Yes, and in dense dead skinny & tall trunk lodgepole whether it be pine beetle kill or floods. wildfire or combo, consider entire trees falling around the vibration. Colo used to mark the trees for taking in the cut zones with paint though I don't know that's still the case nor in SD. Will you be in Nat Forest cut zones?
Open face cut as well. Have had too many of them lean over and stand on the flat bottom of a standard face cut. Wood less flexible and no top weight to help pull it over.
I have a pretty big dead standing oak, it's a heavy leaner too. I've gone back and forth about taking it down, when I look at it all I see is firewood in my stash, it would be a great score!! But other part of me see's a fair amount of risk as I am not the most experienced. I keep hoping mother nature will do me a favor one of these storms. Just yesterday I went over and took another look at her and she's getting worse and more dangerous. Starting to rot, has a fair amount of fungus growing, and some nasty gooey stuff oozing, not really sure what that is. Lot's of overhead dead limbs as well! Afraid it's rotted too much will barber chair and just crumble not for a rookie like myself.
Agreed, it's way off in the back of the my property. I need about 6 - 7 dropped that are close to my house done first, they are very big and out of my league. It's a real expense that we just keep putting off.
Data point: Took down two dead Ash today. They were dead, dead. No twigglings up top, and bark in some places just peeled off. Picked the drier of the two and took moisture readings. Consistently in the 22s and 23s. Definitely not ready to burn in a modern stove. But maybe if split and stacked right away it'd be ready by the end of the winter? Hard to say, but I'd guess not. Ash dries quick, for sure, but it's not magical as some would have you believe.
Monadnock Monster not trying to give you a hard time BUT moisture meters need to placed in face of a fresh split to get accurate measurements.
Been following this one , use to cut quite a few dead ones. They can be for sure sketchy. Felled some before that ended up being 80% hollow - walked away feeling fortunate something bad didn’t happen. My favorite dead trees are the ones that a storm or whatever knocked over and didn’t land flat on the ground, caught up or propped up. I have cut a lot of that and if down a couple years is awesome ready to go firewood. Split and let residual moisture ( if any ) wick away and call it good.
Id give it at least six months and check then. If the bark is off it maybe ready by then. Nice looking saw btw!
Trees actually aren't supposed to be out here where I live. This is grassland prairie out here. If you drive around out here ,all the trees are planted in straight rows (man made). We're lucky we can even have wood stoves. The Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge is about 2 miles miles from where I live. But it's mostly cattails, water and flood plain. There are trees in there, but it's a crime to cut them down. And trust when I say the bucks (whitetail) are huge in there! I'll get picture from an old Buck skull my son found in the riverbed on a dry year.
Cool! Oh, oops, sounds like where I live, but there are mountains/Nat Forest not too far with legal cutting zones. We are buying at this point, we don't do it ourselves anymore.
Now, I didnt shoot either one of these. They are just decorations in my house!!! 7x5, or 12 point depending on what part of the country you come from, shot by my old boss from North Dakota. Notice the 2 crab claws on his left side. And this is the one my son found in the riverbed about a 2 miles north along the James River. 7x5, 12 point again. And look at the lower mass of the antlers. Ridiculous..... Come out here to shoot some big deer! We damm near hate the guys from Minnesota and Wisconsin that come here and do the same
I dig the decorations, we had both at our old house...this house isn't big enough for many of them, but cool! Husband thinks the top one is 140 class (sorry I don't know what that means). Same thing happens here with hunters except a lot of the careless ones seem to come from Colo.
I went on a bit of a vacation through south east South Dakota 2 weeks ago. I was considering starting a thread here about “WOOD HOARDERS DESPERATELY NEEDED IN SOUTHERN SOUTH DAKOTA” I seen enough standing dead stuff ( mostly elm I think, hard to tell at 60 mph) to last a couple dozen serious hoarders until rapture. Yeah, most of it was in and around homesteads and shelter belts. That part of the state appears rural minded enough that if someone was willing to start knocking on doors I would think they’d have access to as much firewood as they could possibly burn in a lifetime. where about are you located SD Steve ? We traveled east from Mission over to Mitchell then up to Pipestone Mn. Seems like maybe we crossed the James river several times right outside of Mitchell near the KOA that we stayed at
Whoops again, 1 one those is a 7x5 and the other is a 5x7......some of you may have seen that mistake.
