The Lightning Tree is down!
When we took the woodland on this tree became a distant milestone for me. This week I hit that milestone. Here's the long story...
In our woodland there is a special tree we call the lightning tree. In all probability it was not struck by lightning but none the less we called it the lightning tree. Jo (my wife) is pictured here just in front of the tree for scale. It is an oak – Quercus petraea (sessile oak) to be precise and unlike the much loved twisty and knobbly Quercus robur (english oak) it tends to grow straighter and is the more dominant oak species in Northern England. It also is part of the reason the North East was so important for ship building. However, I digress…
When we took on the woodland I had only just decided that I was leaving my tech career; I hadn’t at that point even entertained the thought that I’d retrain in arboriculture (arb) and forestry. So you can imagine when I was looking at this tree, despite every part of me wanting to get in there with a handsaw and get after it, I had no idea where to start. Also, there was just the small matter of this thing killing me, maiming me or crushing essential parts of me. A dead or severely injured me is useless to my wife and I long ago made a general promise that I wouldn’t die first or do anything too stupid. So this tree became a task that someone with a certain set of skills would have to deal with. I made a promise to the tree that we’d sort it out as soon as possible. It mustn’t be nice to be torn in three and have your inner tissues all exposed like that.
If you know me, you will know that getting someone else to do something is not really something I entertain all that often unless it is electrics, plumbing or cars (although I’ve started to learn about engines and I’m slowly learning how to deal with fixing cars). When I factored in the costs of hiring an arb guy/gal to come and make this tree safe along with all of the fifty plus wind-thrown trees on the woodland I knew I couldn’t afford it from a cash point of view. Once that calculation was performed in my head, about two hundred milliseconds later I decided that I would do all of this work. At this point I didn’t own a chainsaw, I hadn’t considered arb & forestry as a career choice and I certainly hadn’t enrolled at Houghall College on the Arb & Forestry course yet. I was simply all juiced up on YouTube and ready to learn. So in I dove. From late March 2022, until I purchased the chainsaw at some point in July 2022, I watched and read all that I could about using a chainsaw safely and how to deal with windblown trees. The more I learned, the more I realised I couldn’t, and more importantly shouldn’t, attempt to do this tree. If my skills were at week one, then this tree was week fifty. This was my first important lesson in arb & forestry – go no further than you feel comfortable and confident. It’s no guarantee you’ll totally evade harm, but it’s by far the best weapon in your risk mitigation arsenal.
However, I did understand some basic tree mechanics, basic chainsaw cross-cutting and I knew that I could nibble away at the ends the hanging limbs to remove the brash and any smaller limbs. I knew I could keep cutting limbs until I came across one that was supporting the weight of the fallen limbs. I wasn’t nonchalant about the weight of the material I was removing. I understood that if you keep removing weight from a sprung section, it may sooner or later decide that it no longer wants to be sprung. I worked mindfully and checked everything before I cut it. I got my saw trapped lot doing which tells you straight out the gate that I had a lot to learn about tension and compression. I’d keep working until I had removed all the limbs that were not supporting the fallen limbs directly. And that is what I did. Albeit very tentatively.
The tree remained this state all of winter 2022 and every time we visited the woodland we’d stop by the tree, say hi and I’d reiterate my promise to get it sorted ASAP. We didn’t visit the woodland as often as we would have liked during winter and the main reason was that I was mostly trashed at the weekend from the week at college (physically and mentally) and my work experience at a local estate. All of that work at college was paying off though. Over that winter period I got my first chainsaw ticket “maintenance and crosscutting” (formerly known as CS30) and during January to the end of March we had a twelve week period that focused on felling small trees up to 380mm in diameter. This involved dealing with hung-up trees and this is where my worlds collided into an “a-ha” moment. Allow me to explain. As I understand it a hung up tree is where you fell a tree, it partially falls but then gets stuck in the limbs of another tree. It “hangs” in mid-air anywhere between 89º and 15º. It is dangerous situation that isn’t considered resolved until the tree is on the ground. A hung up tree is similar to an up-rooted or windblown tree in the sense that it is partially hanging in mid-air waiting to crush something or someone, but it is different in the mechanical sense that a hung-up tree is no longer completely connected to root plate because of the felling cuts. This is a critical difference. The lightning tree could not strictly be described as windblown or hung up because the root plate was fully intact. However, looking at the fractured tops of the stem where the limbs failed, you can see that there really isn’t any structural support offered to from the stem to the limbs. When I realised this, I understood that I had a situation where I had three hung up trees. One was all by itself on the left and two that were in some kind of odd gravity based relationship.
At the end of March I decided to once again re-visit tackling this tree as I felt I had the skills and confidence to take it down. So I got my gear together (felling lever, winch and chainsaws) and headed to the woodland. I was totally prepared to walk away if it felt like too much, but that didn’t happen. I recorded it all and it was really a bit of an anti-climax. I got it all down with no fuss and for the most part everything behaved as I predicted and thanks to the lessons learned at college, I never really put myself in harms way.
The strategy of dealing with the tree hadn’t really changed since day one which was to nibble everything away apart from the places where limbs in the ground supported the fallen limbs. What had changed however, was that I now had a solid three months of felling experience, including dealing with hung up trees. Not only did I understand tension and compression better, but I’d also consumed a lot of material from FISA and NPTC as well as seeking counsel (no indemnity requested) from my tutors. Knowledge aside, the three key ingredients to my confidence were firstly that I was now confident in making severing cuts that would cause things to fall to the ground. Secondly, that I had a solid grasp on danger zones and using other trees as protection and finally, I knew that one and two were no guarantees, so keeping my guard up, eyes open and escape routes clear was a priority.
I tackled it in two sections. I took out the single hanging limb first. Note the multiple compression cuts where I am sawing. This is one of the two limbs that were keeping this section up. As soon as I cut this, it rolled backwards but I had positioned myself in such a way so that the tree in the middle of the photo prevented the falling limb from moving towards me.
The right hand section all boiled down to one limb. This should give you an idea of just how strong oak is. I picked up a small section of this limb and I reckon it was around the 50-70kg mark. I suspect this entire limb was in the 300-400kg range all of which was supported on a three inch branch. Oak is crazy strong. It is the Chuck Norris of native timber. I didn’t have a tree to protect me on this one so I cut in a wedge (bottom middle) and kept opening it up by feathering it until the timber gave way nice and slowly. Both the upper and bottom limb fell and this was exactly what I had intended. It was very satisfying.
The upper limb had become a hazard in that it was now wedged between the top of the stem and what was the lower limb. I didn’t feel confident enough to cut it out (know your limits) so I got the winch out. The winch is a pain to set up and put away, however using it is a tonne of fun. Two point four tonnes to be precise. And yes, there are dangers to using a winch and in the future I will probably go over it.
With some winching the limb came right out whilst I was a nice safe distance away. I’ll not deny it, this was a massive achievement for me. It wasn’t that I doubted myself and my ability, it was all the steps along the way to get me to this point in my journey.
From the moment that tree was safely on the ground, I’d not only made good on the promise I had made to the tree, but I’d moved (once again) into a new area of professional exploration. I am not claiming to be an expert, but I am claiming that I love this kind of work and I am ready to learn more, be humbled and have an absolute blast whilst doing it. One year after deciding I could not / should not do this operation, I had not only done it, but had done so as part of my new career. I genuinely had a moment after I struck this pose.
There’ll be a video of the entire dismantle coming up shortly that contains not only the juicy parts of the dismantle, but that also hints at what we’re going to do in terms of re-planting when tree planting season comes this autumn (hint/spoiler: we’re going to plant an acre of oak) and a closer look at some of the things I could have done better when dealing with this tree.
Can’t wait for the video, will be good to see that trunk milled up too