Category Archives: The Forest

Firewood Season

While some of you are still struggling with Winter weather our days are getting warmer and it is starting to feel quite Spring-like. I like to get an early start on next Winter’s firewood so it can dry well and also so that I’m not cutting in the forest once the hot weather starts.

I have found in over the 40+ years of firewood gathering that I rarely have to cut a living tree. This year I started with this fir tree that has been dying over the last five years. It had a very unusual “S” shape which made me somewhat uneasy to take it down as the fall direction was hard to read. It was 134 feet tall so something not to tinker with. In early Fall the tree broke off at 40 feet and fortunately fell in the right direction. I took the rest of the tree down yesterday – three feet in diameter and about 125 years old. That corresponds with the time our property was first logged in the late 1890’s. This tree came up as a seedling then. It would have been a beautiful tree to mill but some sort of fungal disease runs through the entire tree.  Very unusual for a fir tree.

This hemlock did exactly the same things as the fir. It stood at about 95 feet tall but broke off at 45 feet. This tree is about 2.5 feet in diameter. Again, the tree was diseased but I’m finding the hemlock are more prone to disease.

I have four other alder trees to take down and then all that is left is the splitting and stacking!