Mt. Shasta dead ponderosa removal

[Oxman]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ayNhwdiI0k]YouTube - Mt Shasta Pine Removal[/ame]

 

We met up in the town of Mt. Shasta with Steven & his tree crew. We were at the site of a 175' tall Ponderosa Pine tree that had died after being struck by lightning about 6 months earlier. Steven had agreed by phone a week earlier to pay my time & travel expenses to train his crew by demonstrating advanced tree removal techniques.

 

 

 

The next morning, we had a safety meeting with everyone present at the job site. Everybody wore their hardhats. By the second day, they forgot all about wearing hardhats. As a freelancer, I commonly encounter a lack of commitment to safety that pervades these crews, from the company owner on down thru the ranks.

 

To start my part of the job, I stepped out of the bucket at 65' & started zipping limbs down a rope tied to the trunk of the dead tree and anchored on the trailer hitch of a jeep. The tension in the rope allowed the caribiner the limbs were tied to, to slide downward at a sideways angle, away from the roof directly below, and out into the yard. Coincidentally, this jeep was parked right next to the chipper, where the brush was neatly deposited into the dump truck. Over a hundred limbs were handled this way, in a repetitive motion pattern. This process continued on into the second day.

 

While I was stripping the trunk of the dead tree, Steven dispatched the side stem. This was a smaller trunk, which still had green limbs, since the bolt of electricity hadn't touched it on the path to ground.

 

To access this tree, Steven moved his bucket truck out of the drop zone & parked it on the opposite side of the house. At this point, the boom could not quite reach the trunk. He then proceeded to tie his climbing line on my rope that dangled above. I pulled it up and tossed it over a convenient fork above, and sent the other end back down to him. This allowed a sideways rappel out of the bucket to pull him over to his objective on the live stem.

 

He used the same zipline rope that was tied to the trunk above my head, as it ran past him to the ground. We alternated sliding limbs down this line from each of our trees, sometimes within seconds of each other. The ground crew gamely tried to keep up with our dynamic rigging design, as we formulated new strategies during the ascent. Our goal was to remove all the brush from both stems as we climbed upwards, and get it chipped up and out of the way.

 

While one of the limbs Steven cut was still sliding downward, the gyration of the taut line under sudden pressure caused it to bounce and strike the still running chain saw, nearly severing it. This could have had serious consequences, possibly releasing the several hundred pound limb onto a rain gutter or, even worse, on a ground worker below. The nick in the line was notable but uneventful, and it illustrated the need for more careful safety procedures and precision saw control.

 

After Steven had completed the stripping of his stem, he began cutting the upper logs from the multi-stem trunk. In between his cutting of logs, I continued limbing the dead tree. I attempted cutting a very small dead limb and tossed it towards the drop zone, but failed to account for the wind resistance. This caused the branch to fall short and bop Steven smartly on the shoulder & left hand as it brushed by him and fell to the ground. He was surprised but uninjured, and I apologized at the slip. We continued by tying all the rest of the limbs to the rope, and controlled their descent with renewed vigilance.

 

Chris, one of the videographers, had been using my Sony HX1 camera as a backup when the battery on Steven's camcorder died. Chris arranged to have the Sony tied on my line, and I hauled it up in the tree. I took a few spectacular still photos & video shots looking straight down on Steven from above while he dropped big wood on the ground. Later, the ownership of images taken by multiple photographers using the same cameras came into question because no photography agreement had been made in advance.

 

After Steven dropped the wood from his tree to the ground, there was no room for more brush in the drop zone, so I descended, leaving the tree still standing until the following day. We had a wrapup meeting to discuss how the job was to proceed from that point. It was noted that a longer saw would be needed to cut the large diameter wood from the lower stem. The chainsaws were dull from a long day of woodcutting, and while sharpening, I noticed the teeth on one of the saws had worn out and been resharpened so that the saw was cutting crookedly. We agreed that the saw parts would need to be replaced, but this important chore was not done, causing problems the next day. The crew didn't get to the saw shop to buy sharp chains because they were distracted by the process of loading the tractor up on it's transport trailer.

 

We started day 2 anew, and I mounted the bucket again, stepping off at 65'. Only another 110' to go. The last few dead limbs were cut & slid down the line as before. Chris got some good video shots of the topping process from the bucket while it was fully extended while parked on a side street a block away. The top was slid down the line just as if it had been one of the much smaller limbs. The same rigging system was used, just a bit more spectacular looking as it tipped over and ran safely away from the roof as it fell next to the chipper. With the last bit of the brush on the ground, we chipped it up and put away the chipper. This cleared the drop zone to make room for bouncing logs.

 

We switched our rigging tactics to begin bombing wood in an uncontrolled flight down to the ground. The small diameter wood was able to be cut with the 16" bar of the topping chainsaw. I pushed these pieces by hand without benefit of rope. At this point the small chainsaw was lowered to the ground, and a bigger saw was hoisted to do the cutting of the log. This was the saw that was supposed to have had its chain replaced.

 

We rerigged the rope as a tag line for the bigger logs in the midstem. The rope was tied to the top of the log, then I climbed down about 15', and the crew pulled while I cut. After each piece fell, they untied the rope and reattached it to my climbing rope. I pulled the rope up to the top of the tree, then tied it onto the new, lower tip of the log. I then descended another 15-20' and made the next cut.

 

As I was cutting the larger diameter log, the saw became stuck in the kerf of the cut because of the poor condition of the teeth on the chain. The two face cuts could not be lined up because the line of the cut became curved as the sawdust was removed more quickly from one side of the cut than the other. The process of using force to push the crooked saw teeth to feed into the wood was time consuming and fatiguing. I ended up calling for another saw, but had to wait while the crew drove across town to the chainsaw shop to buy a new one.

 

As I sat parked there a hundred feet up, the inactivity caused my muscles to cramp up. When the cutting resumed with another saw, the rope tied to the log was being pulled by the crew that was standing under the oak tree. They did not know I could not see them because they were under this tree, so I waited some more, still cramping. Steven was in plain sight with his back to me while installing the long bar on the other chain saw, and was unaware the job was stalled again. Soon he returned his attention to the 18' log weighing 3,000# that was about to fall, and he gave the go ahead to resume cutting.

 

The next log was larger in girth, requiring the saw with the long bar. It turned out the chain for this bar had also been resharpened with the same lopsided tooth pattern. It did manage to cut thru all of the remaining logs, although in slightly less-than-straight lines.

 

All the wood fell straight into the drop zone. The soft dirt allowed the logs to freefall down from above and embed themselves in their own slight depression, laying relatively still in the confined space without bouncing. The wood was cut into rounds and carried away by the tractor. The debris was cleaned up and hauled away, and the customer was satisfied. The job was completed successfully, with no one hurt, and no property damage.

 

The crew was exposed to new faces and new techniques, increasing our understanding of the design of rigging systems. An unknown climber had entered this world for 2 days, tackling the removal of a tree that was larger than the trees the crew usually worked on. We communicated effectively, which had allowed a distinct sequence of times where the drop zone was owned by the climber dropping pieces, then yielded so the pieces could be safely retrieved by the ground crew and loaded on the trucks. The key to the safety of this job was the relinquishment by the climber of the drop zone while the brush was cleared. This way, no one was under any falling pieces. By consistent, repetitive body movements, the saws released the tree sections uniformly, sending them spinning & slamming into into the correct placement designated as the drop zone.

 

The higher up the stem, the smaller the drop zone seemed to appear. The safe spot looked positively tiny when dropping that first log from 150' up. Experience has shown that logs do fall straight down, no matter how much it looks like a tunnel painted on a rock wall by the Roadrunner. In this case Wiley E. Coyote was not fooled.

[josharb87]

cool! any more vids?

[tommer9]

Great stuff.

Did something not go 100% according to plan at 1.39 lol?

[David Humphries]

Fine vid & shot set.

 

Big ol'e lump, looks really well executed.

 

Thanks for posting

 

 

 

 

 

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[Mike Hill]

Welcome to the Site!

 

That didn't look very advanced to me,how were the guys taking down Trees in the past?

[White Noise]

cool! any more vids?

 

Yeah just like the man said

[Oxman]

Howdy,

 

These are good comments. The job wasn't advanced by your standards, because there was no lowering device to do tensioning with.

 

But it was outside their envelope. The most 'advanced' time was when both climbers were using the same zip line in a short timeframe. The fact that there were two trunks, one live, and one green, was a complicating factor. Sorry, the video of brushing out the live brush was unavailable.

 

I believe they thought the logs would not stay put. By cutting the pieces rather long, they could not jump past the drop zone. Long pieces tend to not tumble after hitting.

 

We had the first few logs piled up against the house on the left side, so pieces were safe landing there. On the right side, the chipper had piled up a mound against the fence, so the neighbors house was safe from any log that decided to jump towards the right.

 

Standing at the base of the tree, the main thing folks noticed was the distinct backlean up to a point where the the raingutters. I was able to disregard this, because it wouldn't affect the climber until the butt cut. This backlean was caused by the opportunistic trunk buttress where the roots had colonized the soil in the yard. The building foundation had suppressed the root growth on the back side of the tree.

 

The purpose of the cut made while standing on the roofwas to get just above the backlean. We had a tractor that was too tiny for the size of the work. It only gave us a bit more pulling power than 3 guys on the rope before the 4wd tires broke traction & spun in the soft earth.

 

I realized the lean was not a factor above the roofline, but those guys weren't looking past that point, and it freaked them out mentally.

 

Another element of scale was using the 046 with the 32" bar up in the tree. Their idea of a good blocking saw is an MS260, which I happen to think is a toy. A larger saw is fine with my frame of 6'3" and 250#. Comfort is all about using the tools that we are most familiar with.

 

As a climber that started out on manila line, the type of saw ordinarily selected for this tree could be a 100 cc (6 cubic inch displacement) saw like a Stihl 075 or Homelite 1050. I bought an 084 when they were first introduced in the late 80's.

 

It spounds like some more video is in order. Steven & I have been climbing together in the coast redwoods at the Treehouse Project, and in the giant sequoias at 7,500' elevation of central California (Bull Buck).

 

Here's a short clip of a recreational climb we did in a 9' Sugar Pine at Black Fox. Location is the McCloud area on the east slope of Mt. Shasta. Steven is seen at the beginningt using his big shot, but a crossbow shot to the halfway point was what it took to get thru the tangle.

 

BlackFoxSugarPineTree - Mountain Hardwear's The Expedition Republic

 

Arboreally yours,

 

Michael Oxman

Treedr.com

[White Noise]

Nice climb Oxman

[Stephen Blair]

Nice big tree:001_smile:

[Pete Mctree]

Nice, I enjoyed that. Thanks for taking the time & effort to both film and document it to share.