The Attack Tree of 2012

Way back in the 60s, my father in law bought some woodland in Vermont.  He's no longer able to travel there anymore, so for the last few years it's just been Dawne and myself.  One of the last things he did up there was to build a very nice, 8x8 foot shed to store the mower and other tools.  Unfortunately, before building the shed he only cleared a 9x9 foot patch of land.  So not only does the shed have trees very close to it, but there's also no room for the trees to fall if you did cut them down.  Oh, and did I mention the trees are crowding themselves out and many are dead or dying?

As a result, we've been clearing a number of trees so that the one right near the shed have a place to fall.  If you've never cut down a tree before, it's usually a very simple process: Cut a wedge on one side of the tree (on the side where you want it to fall), then make a back cut.  This leaves a small section of wood that acts as a hinge and controls the direction of the fall.  When everything goes according to plan, you end up with a stump that looks like this:

Now there are several ways this can go wrong.  Most likely, the tree will try and go the wrong direction, but usually when this happens it just pinches the saw in the back cut and doesn't actually fall.  If it's a small tree, you can simply push it over in the desired direction by hand.  It's actually kind of fun to do this with a 30' tall tree.

The other thing that can go wrong, and I didn't take any pictures of this when it happened, is that the tree falls in the desired direction, but gets hung up in the branches of another tree.  In this instance, I whacked the tree with a sledge hammer to knock it off the stump, which made it a couple feet shorter but still otherwise standing beside itself, so to speak.  It actually took a couple iterations of cutting and hitting it with the sledge to get it to fall over.  Whew I thought, glad that's done with.  Just one more very dead tree to cut down today.  And because it lost it's top, it's not going to hang up in any branches.

But this was no ordinary tree.  It was one of the rare zombie attack trees.  The real problem was that it was 6 inches in diameter, but only the center-most inch had any real structure too it.  Dawne had leaned against it earlier and almost pushed it over by herself.  When the saw cut through the structure on the back cut, the tree fell in whatever direction it wanted.  This is not a pretty stump:

And of course, it fell in the worst possible direction:

Oh crap.  Well, might as well get the camera.  Looking at the picture again, I just noticed that the bottom of the tree is several feet away from the stump.  How did that happen?  Anyhow, there was no significant damage to the shed.  Also note in this picture the two trees, right next to the shed, one of which is about an inch from the roof.  Also, you may notice two white birches behind the shed.  Those are actually different forks of the same tree with a very wide base, which is only about 3 feet on the other side.  We may need to call in the professionals for that one.

How does one get a tree off a shed without doing further damage?  I hate ladders, but up onto the roof I went to try and push the tree off.  Too heavy to push.  Perhaps I can just grab a branch and roll it off.  Oh wait, if I do that the branches will try to knock me off the ladder, so I should break as many as I can off first.  And it still doesn't want to roll off easily.  So off the ladder and...

... ah yeah, when I try to roll it some of the other branches are in the way.  So I cut those off with a pole saw and get out the log roller to roll it off the roof.  But first, Dawne suggests that we move the ramp out of the way so the tree doesn't land on it.  Okay, let's put it over... there!  And the tree gets rolled off the roof.

And lands on the ramp anyway.  Grrr, but job completed except for cutting it up into sections small enough to be carried away.

Afterwards, we have a small clearing with a number of stumps to show for our effort:

That was my weekend, how was yours?  :-)