Sorry Brad, it was supposed to say poplar or Pine because before coffee I can’t find deciduous or coniferous in my brain. I was originally taught old school hardwood and softwood, if you could stick thumbnail and dent it; it’s a softwood! Pine, poplar and silver maple are softwood, Hickory, oak and red gum and few conifer are hardwoods. It really makes no difference if tree loses it leaves or not.
Agreed it reminded me a lot of poplar at first, but I’ve had 3 different varieties of that and this is different. I don’t think it’s butternut because that has a chambered pith like black walnut.
There’s both varieties there, but bigtooth is more prevalent. Bigtooth has the more furrowed bark, to the point where it’s hard to recognize it as aspen until you look at the upper branches.
Mystree score 100% solved now. This turned out to be bigtooth aspen, which I'm kind of embarrassed to admit. Not because it's trash wood, but because I've scored it several times already on top of identifying it for other people on here. I checked on these splits recently and they were dry to the point of being very light. Looking at it again with fresh eyes, I happened to notice that the heartwood in a couple pieces had some darker discoloration which reminded me of aspen, as did the almost white grain in general. So I grabbed some known aspen from a different score (larger diameter) and compared the wood grain. Same stuff. I went back to where I got this mystree wood and found the cut stump. Sure enough, the stump didn't resprout but all around it the root system sent up new suckers. The leaves left no doubt. If not for the site issues with pictures I'd have taken one. Anyway, bigtooth aspen, which has much rougher, darker bark compared to quaking (trembling) aspen which is also native here but iconic in the Rockies.
Always nice to finally figure it out. Pain in the aspen to do so! Had a couple of those myself with KCT and Chinese chestnut.
This drove me nuts back in March when I scored it There's a few things I've burned over the years that I'll never know what it was, at this point anyway. Not that it's that important in the grand scheme of things, just nice to know.
