My Holiday weekend......

The final tally for the weekend. Man I love cutting wood .

I had some dead standing red pine that the forester said should come down. No better time than a nice long fall weekend to tackle the project. I even managed to haul all the tops away too. Great weekend for outdoor work.

Now what to do with it all

WOW, you've got some work ahead of you Herd. I'm sure you guys in Wisconsin work fast so how about pics by next weekend with it all split and stacked?

"Now what to do with it all "

The fun's not over yet
Split & stack (& post pictures of course) .

Then feel real good about your 2 year+ (13/14 & 14/15 & ->) , shoulder season wood supply
Dead standing, some may be ready to burn now ?

NICE!!

That'll keep you warm in WI

looks good post pix when all split and stacked

Burn it baby...burn it

I hope you had some help lifting those. How big an area did you gather all that from?

Great weekend workout. Next weekend for splitting?

living up in Wisconsin you shouldn't have to figure out what to do with it

Nice! How did you end up stacking those? You look tough, but not THAT tough

Nothin but a few good days of hard work, 1 man, 1 saw, 1 atv and a little gruntin. Actually the cutting was the easy part. I could only drive the atv and trailer to about 10% of it once it was on the ground. The only way to get them loaded onto the trailer was either carry, roll, drag, teleport or other . I don't mind a little hard work and a lot can be said about leverage and how to use it. Plus I love cuttin wood!

The longest part of the whole deal was cleaning up the tops and all the small dead branches and crap. Then hauling them away. I have a slight case of OCD when it comes to my property and dead stuff laying on the ground. I've been told I probably have the cleanest 5 acre wooded parcel in Wisconsin.

I'm guessing I have about 250-275 mature red pines on part of the property and I go out after heavy winds and pick up anything bigger than my thumb and longer than 2 feet long that's on the ground. Yeah, I know, I'm a bit of a nut job.

My original intent was to give someone with an outside burner one heck of a deal on it but nobody seems to want it. I left most pieces 40"-42" long. This is more shoulder season wood than I would need for 4-5 years or longer so I may still sell most of it. Plus I'm not keen on burning it in the 30 unless I'm around to keep tending to it and burn it hot. Something about the pine.... I dunno (shrug). I work almost 12 hour days so burning it during the week isn't really an option.

As for splitting, probably not this winter. I have another 3-4 cords of hardwood that need to get split up yet this winter. But you never know.

You stacked those logs by hand? Seriously? I'm known to be naive at times... Some of those look to be pushing 300 pounds

Ditto that...awesome work!

I'm still working on selling it, don't know if I want to put any more effort into it for red pine. We'll see how winter goes and if it's still around by February if I tackle bucking it and splitting it.

Some of the bigger logs may have 200+lbs but definitely not 300lbs. They just take a little more finesse. I'm a workout, running, health food fanatic and have been told I'm curiously strong for my scrawny little 145lb frame. While I'm not "old" per say at 40, I'm no 18 year old right out of high school either. But I do take care of myself and that really helps on long weekends like this.

The goods news, or bad news, depends on how I look at it. The rest of the pines need to be thinned out as well. They have never cut them and the forester recommended taking about another 30-40 of the stunted ones out of the remaining healthy ones. It would improve overall health of the property. I may have to set something up ahead of time with someone that would want those.

A-W-E-S-O-M-E. Did I say awesome? Great work and what a picture!