Tis The Season For Logic And Reason
I’ve fallen my fair share of trees, but don’t get the wrong opinion, I am not a professional faller. We didn’t log commercially, we had a sawmill on the ranch and only bought lumber when we needed hardwoods other than poplar for building furniture or windows. We usually cut two to twenty truck loads of trees every winter depending on what was to be built later on in the year.
Falling is a technical and dangerous skill. Widow makers and barber chairs can happen in less than a second and your life is changed forever or over. A inch and a half branch falling from thirty feet up is enough to crack a hard hat and the skull of an unlucky faller. Trees with a vertical imperfection or split will sometimes crack lengthwise during the falling procedure and the top slab will crush or cut the faller in half. Actually it is all a numbers game. I would fall between a hundred and six hundred live trees every winter. A real logging faller will fall over a hundred trees a day. His chances of getting killed are much greater. Those numbers are for green or live trees and does not take into consideration the dry trees you log for firewood.