Woodpile Report: Round #1

[Three weeks ago I admitted my “keep the pipes thawed” initiative was off to a slow start. However, firewood is not a sprint it’s a marathon. I recently made some (limited) progress.]

Round #1:

A friend had trees interfering with a fencing project. They had to go. Was I interested in free wood? Hell yeah!

A plan was formed. I’d fell the trees. (I happen to be good at directional felling.) My friend would do traffic/safety duty (it was near a road), buck the logs, and use his equipment to move stuff around. (He has a garage brimming with implements of diesel powered hydraulic awesomeness. All hail mechanization!)

Time was of the essence. Alas, scheduling put me on a course to failure. I had to wait for the weekend and arrived late in the afternoon. I worked like a dog but just couldn’t get enough done before sunset.

That said, there’s more to life than stacking consumables. I had fun. These trees weren’t big but they were many and adjacent to a road. One by one I dropped ’em where I wanted ’em. Like a boss! No sawyers, tractors, powerlines, or cars were crushed. Yay me.

I burned my time littering the area with felled trunks instead of amassing bucked & split firewood. In the end I gathered one paltry trailer load of the good stuff and then the light was gone. At least the fenceline was cleared.

End result? One trailer’s worth of unsplit rounds. A fair haul but going Paul Bunyan for hours had allowed me to form unreachable mental visions of a mountain of firewood. There was still plenty of wood to be had but it was not fated to be mine. The next morning the world of work intervened. I abandoned my share of all that wood and hit the road. I was two hours east of home base before I realized I’d brought a chainsaw with me (still sitting in the truck’s back seat) and yet I’d forgotten my toothbrush. (I guess the only good thing about TSA is that I’ve never accidentally brought my chainsaw on a commercial airline.) A few weeks later I returned home to split and stack what I had and mourned the lost opportunity of the other trees.

End result? Half a cord of moderate quality wood. It was a good try but I just didn’t have enough time to get serious.