10/18 #4
Story time... we interrupt your usual program to bring you: CUTTING FIREWOOD in NOWHERE, SOUTH DAKOTA
This pic was taken last, but pretend it was first. My neighbor's ranch, from my house to this gate, is about 8 miles. The numbers in this pic represent the places he made piles of dead trees he dragged out of the creek bed with his 4x4 tractor. Number 1 is where I was cutting last week (relatively small pile), and number 2 is where I went today (huge pile). From the gate to position number 2 is just over 1 mile of rough pasture. 4WD was not required, but if you exceed 5mph, you're going to bounce your teeth out. His land is several thousand acres of grassland, like you see in this picture. He's an Angus breeder who gets about $8,000 for an "average" bull and prime proven breeders go for about $20,000-30,000, so it might seem amazing that he'd bother doing the labor to drag trees out of the creek bed (that line of trees you can barely see in this picture follows the creek) for an old fart like me to cut up for firewood, but if you think about it real hard, it is mutually beneficial. He needs to keep the creek bed clear to guarantee good water flow, but if he merely drags them out and leaves them, he loses a tiny piece of pasture each time, and his herds often hang out near those creeks, so he wants good grass there. I go clean up the mess by cutting all those trees and removing them, and I then get my winter firewood for the cost of my labor (and a gallon of gas to go there and back). The tracks you see in this photo are made by my truck going to and from the cutting sites. That's not a road, but just a couple trips smashes the fragile grass, so I tried not to chew up any more than absolutely necessary.
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This is the pile of wood I am currently working on. The truck (you all have seen a Ford F150, so you know its size, although this one sits about 4" higher than the average 4x4 - necessary for the muddy crap I often drive in) shows the scale. The dead tree pile goes from out of picture on the left clear back to near the edge of those trees behind the pickup. There is enough wood there, if I can manage cut it all (questionable, given my current physical condition, but I am damned well going to try), to heat my house all winter. He'll pull out at least this much every year.
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Here's the obligatory "show off the Husqvarna 455 Rancher chainsaw" picture. It has a 20" bar, so you can see the average size of the dead trees (mostly Ash, but some Cottonwood too). I cleared out almost everything in this frame today (NOT the standing trees in the back, of course), which filled the pickup bed. Only one
vape break during the process, to wipe the sweat out of my eyes and rest for 10 minutes. It really isn't the sawing that's all that hard, but the lifting and stacking in the truck that is hard on my tired old body.
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Tomorrow, I unload the pickup in the garage, pile it all next to the splitter (22-ton hydraulic run by a lawnmower engine), split it and stack it. I will be back to this site for more on Tuesday (weather permitting). Anyone brave enough to come over and help?
We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
