I Chucked Wood up a Mountain Today so I Guess That Makes me a Woodchuck.

Today we ran out of wood on our back porch and instead of going down to the woodshed and getting a load on the trailer we decided to cut down a large dead tree that our neighbors didn't want. This tree had been dead for over two years so it was seasoned and ready to be burned and once it was cut up it and loaded onto the trailer it would require less handling than the wood in the woodshed. Every load added to the woodshed ends up getting handled six times. After it is cut, it is loaded onto the trailer, unloaded and stacked, reloaded on the trailer, unloaded on the back porch, and then for the last time touching the wood it gets burned of before it gets burned. The wood we cut today will be handled only four times. The reason we cut this tree down was not that we were hurting on wood in the woodshed. We have plenty. We just saw this as an opportunity to get an extra four trailer loads of wood that we would not have to take out of the woodshedThe tools used in this project was our large assortment of chainsaws, the cant-hook for rolling the logs, several wedges (in case a chainsaw got stuck), the tractor and the trailer .

To start the project we felled the tree. This tree was conveniently located on a hill in front of our road leaning down the hill of course. Even with the wind in our favor the tree still fell the wrong way and landed on a barbed wire fence. Thankfully the fence is old and not used for anything so when we were done the fence just popped right back up. This made it rather inconvenient for getting the half of the tree on the other side of the fence but we made it work. Having the tree fall down the hill gave us an extra 50' to carry the logs. That may not seem so bad to you but this is the hill that we were working on and as you can see it is pretty steep.

Then came the fun part of rolling the logs up the hill. Though this tree has been dead for several years it is a lot heavier than I thought it would be and you can see that these were not little logs.

The nice thing about these logs was that they split fairly easily and once split each log gave us 18 little split logs.

We usually burn three to five logs every several hours. Start to finish it probably took about eight hours of hard work but we ended up with four trailer loads of wood which should keep our house warm for several weeks.