THE WAYWARD TREE -Camp 1991
Did I say something above about accidents? Here is one that caused some cursing ... at myself.
The photographs below tell their own story because trees are not supposed to fall toward buildings (except in storms); they are supposed to fall AWAY from buildings, especially when you cut them down deliberately!
You are seeing about 2/3's of the height of the tree when it came down. By the time Jean took these pictures, I had cleaned off the branches from the trunk and cut off the top which had arched across the roof.
Notice that the top of the chimney is not horizontal, and it is shorter than it had been.
What happened?
Well, I have dropped a number of medium trees like this one by myself with minimal paraphernalia. This time I goofed up, and I did not have enough equipment to save the situation. The event was agonizingly slow. The tree started to go in the proper direction as I expected (thataway --away from the camp! Keep going! Good!).
Then it slowly righted itself, and the trunk began to close down into the upper cut (i.e. on the building side of the trunk). That was very bad news, and I did not have another wedge of sufficient size to counter this development nor heavy enough rope to control it. The tree actually stood there for quite a while as I rushed around trying to jerry-rig a solution. Eventually, we began to hear little creaks and crackings of wood, and I knew that there wasn't going to be a solution.
Jean and I stood safely back and watched the tree make up its mind, pick a direction, blow out a chunk of wood to the right, and crash into the camp. Actually we were very fortunate; for it took aim at the chimney.
This was a "moment".
I have a healthy respect for the weight of wood. When that much wood is static, your weight is not going to move it. Nor will your weight stop it if it starts to move again; you will splatter before it rests. So my two problems were how to get that tree trunk off the roof without being killed by it when I cut it and how to get it down to the ground without tearing out the side of the building.
The last photograph (below) shows the beginning of the solution.
I am stretching a chain from the trunk to a high point on the standing tree. This is not its final position; for I measured and changed angles a number of times. To the middle of that chain, I attached a rope perpendicular to the chain (to get leverage), and I snaked the rope around other slightly bendable trees to get to a point where I could tie it to the car and really tighten the chain. I propped some spare 2x4's under the trunk to stabilize it, and I cut through just part of the trunk from underneath while standing on the stepladder. I finished the final cut through the trunk from the roof and near the eaves (I was not going to be below that tree!) Everything worked well. The trunk fell and swung away from the building without touching it, and the upper chunk, which I had roped to the chimney and across the roof to the other side, stayed pretty much in place.