Last Round Up

Friday evening I hiked the entire property and made a treasure map of every fallen or standing dead tree the size I can use. The news wasn't good. I had to re-design the roof based on what I have left to work with. On Saturday I rounded them up and hauled them to the site. I left no stone unturned as they say, one of the fallen trees was hanging over the river, its root ball still attached to the bank. I dropped it and floated it upstream using the water to carry it. Real lumberjack style.

I'm sure this river has been used before to move lumber but I would bet it was a very long time ago.

I got two logs out of the tree and pulled them about fifty yards upstream to a less daunting embankment, closer to the cabin. I ended up with six twelve foot fairly strait logs by   the end of the day. All six have at least a 6 inch diameter at the tip. Today I cut six notches and stacked three logs. The walls are just under seven feet around and I plan to start on the roof next weekend. Weather was pretty good for felling, hauling and notching. My wade up the river was perfect. The temp is like bathwater in August. All in all a great weekend and a real treat to be finished felling and hauling logs.

Felling leaning trees

Instead of waiting for the dead fall to come down on its own I decided to harvest the dead trees and build a cabin out of them. The first thing I had to do was find some instruction on dropping trees that lean into others. These are called "widow makers" because they can fall quite unpredictably when cut.

I found a few helpful resources on the internet. The most helpful was the one that instructed me to cut the wedge out of the tree on the top side and then cut the strap on the under side. This effectively caused the tree to drop straight down only a matter of a few inches. The tops of the trees remained lodged in the surrounding trees which turns out to be pretty manageable.
Once the tree is free from the stump you can wedge a sturdy branch under it as a lever and lift the tree up slightly. As you lift the tree will slide slowly back towards the stump. Move it back about a foot at a time and eventually the smaller branches at the top will free themselves from the surrounding trees and it will drop. I didn't take any photos of the leveraging process because...well, I was leveraging! This is one of the above windfalls with the top cut off after bringing it down. As you can see I only had to lift it a few feet back past the stump before it came down.