Craigslist score maybe. I pulled out one load last night. He says maple, and there are maple leaves all over but this looks like cottonwood maybe. It is a small lot and trees were all cut towards the center into a layered mess. It is hot right now and the trees were recently cut. The trunks are cleaned so no attached limbs or leaves. The small wood has been taken so I'm in to the really big stuff. Bark is pretty thin, under 1/2" and the trunks are quite straight and large at the base. Say 36"+. The smell was somewhat cottonwoody cat pee like but maple isn't exactly an evergreen, it wasn't a strong smell. edit to add photos, oops.
All the maple I get seems to always have moss on it like in the pics, but our maple and cottonwood is really hard to tell apart from each other, but with all those maple leaves around it that is a good sign. Looks like a pain to get at to cut and load though. But I also see a lot of what appears to be cotoneood leaves in that second pic
I used google earth and looked at the street view from before the logging and see what I think is one huge limby maple, and then several very tall cottonwoods. The branch structure is like cotton on the big ones. There are some non-maple leaves in there but many layers of limbs. It is a pretty messy deal. So guys, I'm not going back to cut and hump that cottonwood through 30-50 feet of slash pile to get to my pickup. I really like burning maple so it was worth asking.
The leaves and berry clusters look a bit like pictures I've seen of pacific madrone. I don't think that's what the wood is though - the rounds appear to be some type of softwood.
Madrona is very easy to identify by the bark but this whitish wood with mossy, thin bark, and no leaf evidence was tough for me. I don't even mind cottonwood if it is easy and straight but this particular score was hard work so I wanted to be sure of what I was getting.
Whoops, I was at home getting my wheelbarrow for tonight's pickup. As long as I have the saw in the truck, sideboards on, and a change of clothes in the truck I can be pretty available for wood when it pops up.
Maple has opposite branching and leafing, cottonwood has alternating branching an leafing. Remember the old acronym: mad horse. It stands for maple, ash, dogwood and horse chestnut, aka buckeye, the only Deciduous trees with opposite branching and leafing.
I would say with almost 99 percent certainty that it is black cottonwood. Due to the smooth sided cotton wood leaf seen on the ground. They get mossy and have a baswoody bark when younger like those do
There were both maples and cottonwood in the stand. All leaves were off of the trunks so leaves were not valid for identification.