Category Archives: Woods

Korte, brush piles, chainsaw, etc

Last of the wood piles

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After five long years, the last of wood piles are gone. I finally got up the nerve to take the pickup down into the woods… and get her back out. This opens up lots of possibilities. Instead of hauling bags of mulch in a wheelbarrow, I can drive the entire load to where it’s needed. Same for firewood.Couldn’t have done it without the pickup and, sadly, it did not come through unscathed. You really can’t see how big the dent is in these photos. And, ironically, the good steel in this older trucks makes is more difficult to remove some dents.

UPDATE: The guys at Xtreme Body managed to fix the dent and put the trim back on… all for $120.

Haulin’ logs

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During the 30+ years we’ve lived in our home (on 3 acres) we’ve thinned out a lot of trees, mostly scrub cedar. Woodsman that I am, I chainsawed them into logs and stacked them, thinking someone would want them for some purpose. Wrong. They’ve been sitting where I stacked them for years.
Today I started getting rid of them… with the help of Minty Fresh, the family pickup truck. It was always my hope I could drive the truck down into the woods and haul shit out with logs at the top of the list. But having no experience driving off-road in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, I’ve been reluctant to tackle the rough terrain and steep-ish grade. Until today.I flipped the lock-out hubs to LOCKED… put the low-range gear lever in “granny low” and eased down the hill. I scraped a tree once or twice but the pickup is so beat up you’d never find the spot. I loaded up the extra-long bed with logs and made it back to the road without a hitch (although I do have a hitch).
Aside from my lack of off-road/4WD experience, the big obstacle to this project was nobody wanted the logs. But as (bad) luck would have it, my friend George has some big-ass brush piles as a result of last spring’s tornado… and he offered to let me add my logs to his piles which he will safely burn.I’ve got maybe half a dozen more truck loads but it’s a labor of love and great exercise. And if I role the pickup… a great blog post.

Foxes

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Spotted this little critter coming home tonight. He/she and two of his/her pals were eyeing the cat you can see in the background. We’ve seen a single fox a few times but this was our first sighting of three. Update: A neighbor took the photo below.

Hauling trees in the pickup

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Barb and one of her gardening buddies went tree shopping today and brought back four pretty big trees that probably wouldn’t have fit in the back of the Lexus. Getting them on the grown without damaging them was a bit of a challenger but Barb and I got ‘er done. A big strong man with mechanized equipment will be moving and planting. I do not know how I made it all these years without a pickup.

Log guard rail

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A year or so back I had a bit cedar tree cut down and saved half a dozen pieces of the trunk, thinking Barb’s nephew might carve them into something interesting. He didn’t. Today I moved them to the edge of our drive to serve as a barrier when backing out of the garage.

I’ve never failed to stop before reaching the edge but it’s a 15 or 20 foot drop and the thought of rolling The Truck down that 45 degree slope into the propane tank… well, I don’t want to think about it.

When a tree falls in the forest…

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I fired up the chainsaw yesterday and cut up a couple of dead trees that have been on the ground for a couple of years.

I’d normally just leave these but I plan to drive the Land Rover down into the woods from time to time and these would be in the way.

I only have one power tool: the chainsaw. And I love cutting up downed trees. We’ve got more firewood than we’ll ever be able to burn and I can’t give it away. But getting it up to the house is hard work. So the plan is to spit logs as needed, toss ‘em into the back of the Land Rover and haul them up to the house.