We had a pretty good wind storm Saturday. I had gone in from lunch and the wife was giving me the dickens for being out in the woods. I told her NO WAY was I gonna be out there in this wind and I was only working out in the pasture. I was putting some tools in the truck to go down to the south pasture to work on some fence when I heard this huge Sugar Maple start to go. I watched it go down and snap off 3 other 12 - 14" trees in its path. I was no more than 60' from the base of it in front of the garage. The trunk where I'm standing is about 12" off the ground. I'm not sure how big it is yet, but I'm pretty sure this will be one of the largest trees I've ever cut up. I'm hoping to get some cutting boards and such out of it. Our sawmill can't handle anything close to this size, but I can slice and dice it into 5' chunks and noodle it to get it up on the mill. If there is a hollow section I'll save that for a fun evening at a campfire... Very glad it fell this way and not toward the house. It was at the north corner of the house. I'm glad I dropped the one at the east corner of the house a few years ago. That one would have been in our living room if it would have still been there... The ground was water saturated from 3 or so inches of rain over several days.
Scary stuff. Glad it went that way too. Any more pics of the tree? Be sure to post pics of the harvest and milling.