In the Woods

Well, the week before last we went goose hunting and hardly saw a goose and only heard a very few quite a distance away. Now that goose season is closed and Blake has two chain saws he was nice enough to invited me to go out in the woods and cut some firewood. Karen was gone for the weekend at a conference so off to the woods we went. Geese were everywhere flying low over the woods, taunting us. Darn geese.

Most of the time when we cut fire wood it is in a woods that has been logged. Loggers fell the tree they want, cut the main trunk and leave the rest, normally there are lots tree tops that can be cut up into firewood. The owners of the woods normally want the tree tops cut up to "clean" the woods. Branches are piled for wildlife habitat and the limbs (bigger that 3-4") are cut to length, the top of the trunk not taken by the logger is cut and spit into manageable sizes loaded on a truck hauled home and stacked to either use, if it is dry, or season if it is not. Years ago when we were heating with wood I would cut 10-15 truck loads a years. The old saying goes that firewood warms you twice, once when you cut and split it, and once when you burn it. I have found that it warms you three or four times and it really makes you tired and sore, and generally beats the snot out of you.

Blake has been cutting in this particular wood a couple of years and the tops are pretty well cleaned up. Some that are left are beginning to get a little punky. Another thing that happened in this woods after the logging, is that a bad storm went through and knocked the tops out of several larger trees and up rooted a few more. So we started working on fallen timber and in the case of this tree one that was left stand without any top

A trunk like this without a top sometimes is hard to get down. It lacks the leverage necessary to cause the momentum to make the tree actually fall. it sort of gets hung up on its own lower branches and the smaller trees around it.

This tree also had a big old raccoon that had been sleeping in the hollowed out top. He got a trill ride.

We hooked the cut off trunk of the tree to Blake's truck and tugged it our where we could cut it up.

We cut about two and a half trunks loads. Split and loaded one and got to spend all day in the woods.

That evening Blake dropped me off at home. I dragged myself into the house, drank a couple of glasses of water and decided to go out for a couple of miles walk to try to work out some of the stiffness before I fixed dinner and relaxed. About a mile from the house I walked by a field that we have watched all goose season hoping to see some geese feeding in it, since we had permission to hunt it. As I got of to the edge of the field I spotted about three big flocks circling the field to land. A few steps further and at least 100 geese rose up out of the field with a loud clamor and joined the 100 in the sky. Darn geese.