Another day in the woods (a problem tree dealt with)

Looking  at the south side.  If one tow strap is good, then two is better.

Looking at the north side of the soft maple.  These were 2" tow straps.

Looking up the guy rope that ran east from the tree.

Clearing an escape path.  Some of the trip hazards were frozen in place and took some prying to remove.

That was not so bad...except it crushed all of the hinge cuts we made to the east of that tree.  In the future we will drop the big trees first and then hinge cut the little ones.

The crack that scared us runs horizontally in this section.

Zoomed in a little bit.

The bigger ones don't want to stay hinged.  The current plan is to attempt to hinge cut everything less than 8" diameter.  Trees bigger than 8" we will not fiddle with, we will just dump onto the ground.

A corollary to the 8-inch guideline is that we should probably hinge-cut again when the largest new shoots are 6" in diameter.

That might be a while.  I counted 25 rings on this elm sapling.  This was a typical size for the area.

Bonus pictures

And the sun came out just as we finished.

We spent two-and-a-half hours chainsawing today.  We figured that was a decent day for a couple of fat, old men.  I considered today a great success.  We did not get hurt although I am getting blisters on the bottoms of my feet.