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perfect storm of wood salvaging ease
Tuesday, January 11 2011
Another coastal snow storm was predicted for tonight, so (on Gretchen's suggestion), I decided to salvage some more firewood from the forest. A largish dead American Chestnut had fallen along the Stick Trail about 200 feet south of the house, and, because salvaging it would be easy, I'd been saving it to salvage some time near the peak of winter. First I went out with the chainsaw to buck it into stove-compatible lengths. This was unusually easy because the tree hadn't actually fallen all the way to the ground; it had slid down the slide of a smaller tree and come to a stop in a way that put much of its length a couple feet above the ground. Things would have been easier had my chainsaw not jammed on sawdust several times (there's a sprocket at the end of the chain bar that gets tiny pieces of sawdust in it it and seizes up even with plenty of lubrication). In the end I was able to buck about half the the wood of the tree, which translated into about two and a half carts of wood. Moving the cart through snow is a bit harder than moving it down a snowless trail, although the snow does help to smooth out irregularities in the trail. I retrieved all the wood to the woodshed, split it all up, and put it away. The entire job probably didn't take me more than two hours. Things that made this job especially easy included: the proximity of the tree to the house, the proximity of the tree to the trail, the size of the tree, the fact that it was oriented in a way that made bucking easy, the dryness (and thus lightness) of the wood, and the easy of splitting it (few woods split as easily as dry American Chestnut).
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