BEAUTIFUL MORNING

Mornings were beautiful at this locations. It was winter and very cold, crisp and clear. When the sun came up it was a gorgous day, but very cold to climb.

"DAN THE MAN"

Dan Davis was climbing for us on this job but could only climb for one to two hours each day because of the cold.

LOT OF WOOD

This tree had a lot of wood in it and each day we cut about a trailer lot of wood and hauled it back.

STILL WARM

He must have been still warm when we took this one. Beleive me he was in no mood for pictures as he got cold!

BRANCH A DAY

Each day we seemed to get one major branch off the tree. The job took about 4.5 days.

BIG TREE

Dan looks like he is as high as the house but remember he is about 40 feet behind the house which put him well over the top of the house.

TIED ABOVE

Notice how Dan is always tied in above him. Then when he uses his flip line around the tree, he has two ropes holding him into the tree.

SAILOR

Dan was in the Navy and climbs as if he were over the side of a ship. These are not aborist methods and are interesting to watch.

PULLING HIMSELF

Dan pulls himself up the tree by pullin on one end of a rope looped over a branch and tied back on his belt.

SPECTATOR

Each morning there were about 20 wild turkeys feeding out of the bird feeders in the back yard. They would then roost in the wooded area and watch what we were doing.

ESCAPE

When we first came they did not move until we started to drop branches from the trees and then they took off at a run.

COM'IN DOWN

"Walk'in the tree" to get up and down.

GOING HIGHER

Dan uses this technique to get higher into the tree. Most tree arborist do not use the second rope and climb with just the flip line. This makes it a little harder to get higher into the tree when you need to climb instead of just walk up.

OUT ON A LIMB

"Chunking" a limb. Cutting smaller parts of the limb to fall so that they do not crush anything.

ANOTHER CHUNK

Working back on the limb one chunk at a time.

LOOK OUT

This is where the ground crew needs to be aware of what is happening above and be on guard for flying sticks when the chunk hits the ground.

TARGETING

The ground crew also needs to make use there are not targets under the drop zone. If so they need to communicate them to the climber to take measures to devert the cut so the wood will miss the target.

BIG FALL

From this height a little deversion can change the path of the chunk by several feet. Targets are hard to find sometimes as they are hidden by snow and leaves frozen in the ground.

Aaron

Aaron is against the fence in the background

WAY OUT ON A LIMB

Dan sure has guts to get out on a limb like this!

ON A HILL

The hill adds to the height he is above the ground.

SWING

When the branch is cut the release of the weight will cause the rest of the branch Dan is sitting on the spring back and forth giving him quite a ride. NO THANK YOU! I like the ground work!

SLOWLY

But Dan cut it slowly and the release is slow but even so, he still gets a bit of a ride.

SAFE IN MY SPACE

I like my job. I have the rope going through a friction device that will allow me to hold a couple of tons of wood in the air. I can control or lower it slowly to the ground by my self. The rope is attached to the branch Dan just cut. We did this so we could lower is slowly over a yound oak without damage to it.

CHUNK THE REST

Using a woodpecker stance, the rest of the branch is chunked.

LAST BRANCHES

The last branches were then removed

FINAL STALK

The stalk was then dropped and the site cleaned.