Biggest tree this year for me. 19" Heavy rounds, rolled them around a few times today Nice thing about atv trailer to trailer is it's easier to roll the big ones up the ramp Last load to the trailer: Home just before dark 9 hr 25 min daylight, losing over 5 min per day.
Cookie Monster ramps to load the ATV trailer? Looks pretty smart. Beats noodling any day. Your rounds are still a neat rollable package till they get to their destination. At 19" you are getting into the high yield territory there. The splits start stacking up quick.
Nice Dave, and the pic with the mountains in the background is pretty as a .....picture. I'm glad you're still getting more wood. Never can have enough. So, that's a fairly large Birch there? Different trailer....how'd you get the ATV home? Separate trip?
Nice haul, Dave. Does that type of birch have the "wintergreen" smell to it, like black birch? That's some of my favorite wood to split. Got some BB I gotta work up next, probably for '17-'18. There's a big one down in my parents section of the woods, and a couple smaller ones in my section, dead standing and all starting to rot a bit under the bark.
Trailer fills up quick with rounds that size. Well not quick, almost of the rounds were "rollers" . I'm the slow cog in the wheel when they get that heavy Got about 35 cubic feet out of that big one, I wanted to get that tree earlier but it was to big to skid, with the trailer I can haul it out, just slow for me to move the big ones around, cookie ramp helped.
Same trailer. I'm standing on the atv to get the picture of the load. Using the flash looking down, was near dark.
No winter green smell but not a bad odor. Not a lot of odor this time of the year being colder. A slight fresh cut wood smell when split, but when cutting, no noticeable odor. Dead standing here are rotten. Used to eat the bark off the small birch in WV, Moose eat the tips of the branches, but nothing like the back east "wintergreen" birch smell & flavor.
Yeah it seems to rot pretty fast, from the inside out. I've found a few snapped off branches laying on the ground, where the only thing that was left of them was a hollow tube of bark! I've heard of an "unzipping" technique that I'm planning to try. On the stuff too small to split, you use the chainsaw to score a line through the bark, and it's supposed to let it dry better and halt the rot.
One more trip cutting Then will be splitting & stacking. I can't get into the cutting area with the PU & trailer, after the road/trail has snow, few steep & narrow spots. Barely make it fully loaded in 4x-Lo now. Add ice/snow it gets scary going backwards down a hill being pulled backwards by a loaded trailer. Almost jack-knifed it a few years back with the smaller single axle trailer, lesson learned ! I had to cut some wood , sprinkled the wood chips on the ice, barely got out, now I don't even try if the trial has snow/ice.
Sounds treacherous, stay safe out there I jackknifed my little trailer when I first got it. The tongue is a tube that bolts in to the frame, so I just unbolted it, strapped it to a tree, and tugged it straight. Redneck engineering
