From: blockedofcourse@foo.invalid
On 11/27/2025 8:10 AM, Liz Tuddenham wrote:
> Don Y wrote:
>
>> On 11/27/2025 6:55 AM, Liz Tuddenham wrote:
>>> Don Y wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> I had a tall tree in the front yard that I wanted to fell. There was only
>>>> one likely direction to drop it -- straight across the street -- where it
>>>> wouldn't OBVIOUSLY hit some other structure. But, still no guarantee that
>>>> it wouldn't span the distance and clobber the neighbor's property directly
>>>> across from me!
>>>
>>> Starting from the bottom, take the branches off one-by-one
>>> (symmetrically, so as not to off-balance it) until you can get a ladder
>>> near the top. Then cut off a small section of the top, using ropes to
>>> make it fall away from your ladder. Then cut a bit further down etc.
>>> until it is a manageable height.
>>
>> [That's how I felled the Mulberry tree in the back yard -- with a bow saw
>> and ropes (by myself). But, it was only 25 ft tall so entirely manageable.
>> There, it's "bushiness" was the bigger problem than its height.]
>>
>> After the measurement exercise, it was apparent that I couldn't drop the
>> tree "straight" across the street as it would have ended up crashing into
>> the neighbors fence/yard/swimming pool. So, I had to drop it diagonally,
>> across the roadway.
>>
>> I fastened a pull rope about 20 ft up the trunk and enlisted 4 neighbors
>> to "coax" it in the correct direction, after having appropriately placed
>> front and back cuts to encourage it to fall that way (the distribution of
>> the foliage at the upper branches made it difficult to determine how it
>> would WANT to fall).
>>
>> After it fell, quickly cutting it into 10 ft sections so we could haul it
>> off the roadway and let traffic resume.
>>
>> [The tree was 80 ft tall. No way I was going to carry a chainsaw even
>> *15* feet up the tree in an effort to "top it". That's a job for an
arborist!
>> Neighbors hired a guy to take out 3 Ponderosa Pines -- each over 100 ft
>> tall -- in our adjoining back yards. The guy was like a monkey CLIMBING
>> the tree with a chainsaw hanging off his belt, lopping off branches as
>> he ascended until he could top it and work his way back down!]
>
> I have actually 'felled' a tree from the bottom up: I cleared the
> lowest branches and then made two horizontal cuts about 18 inches apart
> in the trunk, with wedges taking the weight to avoid trapping the saw.
> With the tree roped to its neighbours to keep it vertical I knocked out
> the section between the cuts so that the tree dropped straight down
> about 18 inches.. I kept going like this until it was all down.
I am highly mistrustful of trees. Estimating how they WILL fall seems to
rely on a lot of luck, more than instinct, intuition or science.
I've seen trees literally "corkscrew" as they fell -- spinning in place as
they came down, exactly where NOT desired.
We are lucky, here, in that large trees tend to be singletons and not
closely packed in groves. So, you can always coax a tree to fall in a
desired direction (if you have enough mass doing that coaxing).
I felled all of the original trees on the property as they all could have
posed hazards, over time (we frequently get microbursts, here, that will
take down a dozen or more trees in a two or three block area in one fell
swoop).
But, I opted to hire out to have *our* ponderosa pine felled. It was very
close to the road so falling in any direction would have landed on our house
or any of the neighbors. Complicating this was the large bough that
effectively made it into a 'Y' -- with one branch of the Y threading THROUGH
a neighbor's similarly shaped (though rotated 90 degrees) pine.
At slightly more than 2 ft thick, it was going to be a challenge for me to
tackle it "by hand".
[And, by hiring it out, I could also have them grind the stump to slightly
below grade; the root crown was almost 5 ft across!]
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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