Sebastian Paus (Seb) takes down a big branch. Big brother giving super smart comments. In German!
Video missing…
The Oak Triplet – Part 3
After having taken care of the first two of the triplets there were two things reasonably clear. How to get onto the tree, and roughly how to rig the load to make sure the limbs would come done smoothly. Seb was already back home in Rebstein when I got up early on Sunday and started a little cleanup. I put at least a few of the limbs in their place until I finally brought up the courage to go for the last of the triplet.
It was a beautiful day the sun was shining but it was also quite humid. I put on my climbing belt threw the line and carefully climbed into the tree. It took me a while to position and secure myself sufficiently well so I would be ready to go. I started with one of the smaller limbs and it went down easy. Ana was standing by making sure the kids would not get in the way and I had her there to help me in case I would need help. While taking care of the remaining smaller limbs using the hand saw I already broke a sweat and noted that the heat and humidity in conjunction with the physical work was rather strenuous. Little did I suspect though of how exhausted I would be when finishing my work up there.
When I finish all but the last large limb, the continuation of the main trunk, my T-shirt was already quite wet and Ana brought me a fresh water bottle to keep me hydrated. After a little break I searched the best spot where to cut the main trunk, large enough to make it worth my while but still not too large so I would be able to control it. I secured my new position that was not exactly ideal but ultimately it never is. Once I had the limb rigged and started sawing away I realized that it would take a while to chop through that one the somewhat awkward position making the sawing and the standing rather strenuous. It took me a long time to get through this one. Usually I do not like to interrupt once started but on this cut I had to stop many, many times. It was one of those situations where you ask yourself how in heaven’s name the limb could still not break away while you had already cut so far. I am not sure but it might have taken me an hour … well at least over half an hour in the blazing sun until finally I heard the liberating ‘crack’ from the limb indicating it was about to go down. What was to follow was probably the most exciting tree work action yet… Imagine me standing on the limb which maybe a meter from me was about to tilt down. I was roughly at the height of the tip of our roof nothing around me but the bushy limb that was about to go down. After a few more back-and-fourths with the saw the second ‘crack’ came, I quickly put away the saw and focused on holding the rigging rope. The big limb went down abruptly making the trunk I was standing on spurt upwards for a little while until the weight fell right back onto the trunk causing a sudden jolt…. A pure adrenaline rush! Lowering the limb I do not remember well and somehow I made it down in one piece. When I was back on the ground I was barely able to take off all the equipment. I went into the kitchen, drank a chug of water and had to retreat to the coach, where I slept at least an hour before I was able to get up again. I finished of the remaining trunk while Ana went shopping and I barely beat the rain setting in in the evening.
It felt good in the evening to discuss the amazing success of having cut down the big oak triplet. I was very impressed that I had been able to do this without a major incident. When before that day I had considered to hire someone to take care of the big branch over our tree I was growing more confident I could even accomplish this much more tricky task…. still I was far from certain as I had to use a new technique called ‘limb walking’ to reach my working position and the rigging was definitively more complex as the branch was quite close to our roof. Anyway that was for another day and Ana and I enjoyed the large patch of sky that had opened up above our backyard.
Piece of sky
This is the piece of sky I have opened up in our backyard cutting down one supermassive oak tree that came as a trippling.
Took down part three of the big triple oak in my backyard. It has been a long time that I have been that exhausted. Working in the blazing sun and using a manual saw to go through a 30 cm thick oak trunk while sitting in my double safety, but still standing inside of a tree6 somewhat awkwardly …. wow! every muscle in my body is still burning. The picture shows the trunk remaining. I had to sleep for an hour, take a large ice coffee, and did the trunk afterwards.
The Oak Triplet – Part 2
It is Friday evening (Aug 2) and I receive a call from Seb reminding me that he is arriving in Boston at 1:30am Saturday morning that was just a few hours from now…. Yeah, he told me but I completely spaced out and did not tell Ana and did not think about it. Fine men can take those surprises, as we did not have anything special planned anyways, so my biggest problem problem was to lay this news on Ana.
Well, I succeeded because I did mention about 4 weeks ago that Seb would come, but of course Ana was upset that I did not tell her earlier, and rightly so. Anyways I got the bed for Seb prepared and was waiting for him while the whole house had gone to sleep. I enjoyed some nice LPs with a cigar and it was a really nice chillaxing lonely hours until Seb indeed arrived around 1:30am and he was in good spirits.
We listened to some music meanwhile exchanging news on what was going on. One big topic was Martin’s ordeal with Alex and how that is going to play out in the end. Sad story, and the kids will suffer from this. I remember my own split from my first wife and remember how bad that was for me, but not even close to what this will be. At least we did not have kids and there was no money involved, and both parties actually very reasonable. It was as simple as it can possible get but still I would describe it as the worst experience of my life. With no kids you can just cut all connections and forget about it, but not so with kids, you are going to be linked over the kids basically forever. Anyway, they will figure it out, we drank a beer chilled a little while listening to ‘The Cult’ and talked about the plan for Saturday. I told Seb about my plan to cut down the second triplet on this weekend and he thought it was a great idea and said that it would be a great thing to do together.
Seb taking down the first limb.
It is a video (~150 MB).
We kind of collapsed around 3:30am and hit the hay. In the morning Seb was up pretty early and we both grabbed the kids and took them to Jam’n Java while Ana had the house to herself. When we got back we started to get ready for the second oak triplet. Seb was all gung-ho put on the climbing belt and ventured into the tree not without showing me his cool technique to automatically forward the ascenders 🙂
After some professional re-crotching he got started to rig the first branch. After all was prepared it was time to cut, and cut he did. The branch broke off but fell into one of the next trees and got stuck. Seb fixed that and finally the branch came down nicely dangling on the rigging rope. Seb used the ballay device and he was able to control the decent well. Meanwhile he had broke a sweat and was also complaining about his calf muscle that he had injured a few weeks back. So after the first branch he had to come down and I took over. The remaining pieces were done rather quickly after I figured out the rigging, while Seb was entertaining Ana and the kids and meanwhile cut up the big trunk I left the weekend before. He even created some art: a nice block of oak wood to expose some beautiful pieces or as a piece of art by itself. I might create a few more and also put some finishing touches on them to make the surface nice.
Later we had to quickly pick up Seb suites he left in the hotel in Winchester when he arrived a week ago and forgot there when he left for San Francisco. In the evening I dropped him off for the 10pm flight to Zuerich. It was a great day, good to see my brother and work with him, even better.
Last triplet standing, lots of wood on the ground.
The Oak Triplet – Part 1
My first tree ascend (single rope technique).
It is a video (145 MB).
So, here we are, the equipment has just been bought, I have watched the youtube tutorials on how to ascend and even on how to change to descending mode even when the rope is under tension…. not that easy to figure out when you are dangling up there. First move was to get the rope up there into the easiest of the three oaks. The throwing went pretty smoothly the rope was quickly in a good position and tied to the trunk. Ready to ascend! Before I went up I did do a little test run at about half a meter above the ground. I had some issues and had to try again. The second time I was able to ascend and to return to descending and I felt comfortable enough to go up. My climbing buddy (Ana) had the video camera ready and there it is my first ascend. Once you are well beyond 5 m there is no turning back, it is kind of scary to just rely on the thin rope, but it works like a charm.
Once I was up there it was important to get well into the tree from the rope which actually was fairly straight forward. I quickly employed my second safety putting a sling around the trunk and hooking that into my climbing belt. The first oak is well separated from the house and even the patio so there was little to no danger to destroy anything but the ground in the garden, that is not in great shape anyway. So the happy cutting started and branch by branch went down under close observation of my buddy. It was surprisingly smooth, I was somewhat uneasily thinking about the moment when I had to go down, again relying on the rope and my descending skills.
The Tree Project – Equipment
In December 2011 we got ourselves finally organized and fixed the roof, which was direly needed as the last winter had left us with a number of ice dams and some damage inside…. It was an amazingly mild December I remember and we got the roofers to come, and we did not forget about a new skylight either. Now with the summer in full swing I was watching the roof not getting a lot of sun on the backside and the trees leaving lots of droppings. So finally on July 28, I decided it had to be done and I bought the basic equipment at REI. I bought a harness for rock climbing (not ideal as I found out later), a nice static rope, two nice ascender devices (Petzl), an ballay device (ATS), a number of slings and carabiners.
I also added two reasonably cheap nylon ropes, a thin rope for a rope throwing setup, a simple handsaw and of course a set of excellent quality working gloves (very important!). Ready I was for my first ascend…. Well, I had to watch some tutorials on the web to make sure I could properly ascend and descend with the equipment I bought. Fun, fun… first try was with single rope technique (SRT) and full ascend and descend routine at about 1 meter over the ground 🙂 It worked at the second try.
One thing to always remember: be calm, move at a slow but steady pace and think carefully about what you are doing. Usually once one is up there it is very quick to cut the branch, what takes most time is to position and secure oneself and the pieces to be cut off. Once int he tree, always use two safeties, one is not enough.
Big tree
Visible just for very few days a year…. spring time in the neighbourhood, a beautiful cherry tree.
Beautiful sky from our sun room
The Tree Project – How it all started
It really started when my father visited in May 2010. He wanted to check out Blake and during his visit I started to cut down the first somewhat larger but relatively easy to cut tree.
Pup with the simple tool we used.
You can faintly see the tree trunk still in the back.
Happily sitting on what was before the tree.
Well, these are only the branches.
We talked a lot about all the trees that still needed cutting on our property to protect the house form growing over but it looked like a humongous task at the time. Pub was listening (which I did not really notice much) and on my birthday I received a very thoughtful birthday card (as usual) but also included a small fortune to buy proper equipment to do the cutting by performing a real arborist’s task. I was impressed but never spent the money until finally end of July I bought the equipment and started to implement the master plan. All trees I could do without I had completed over the years.
Picture of the house from advertisement.
Here is a picture how the front of the house looked like before we bought it. The two trees on the left and right hand side of the house both had to go. They were not nice to begin with and they were taken a lot of light from the house. It was reasonably straight forward to get ride of those. The cedar tree (probably a red one) on the left side of the house had carpenter ants in it as I found later. An interesting fact is that the flowers somewhat in front of the stonewall in the front cover actually a part of the wall which is out of shape. They seem unmotivated when you look at them but did not catch our eye originally. Of course when we visited the house we noticed the somewhat decaying wall.
Later I started to severely trim down the trees shading our driveway right at the right side of our house. It was the first higher climb and without any safety, but is was easy enough. The last simple tree action was late fall last year the trimming of all low hanging branches of all trees in the street in front of our house and the most annoying ones over the driveway. Looking again at it now, I should have taken off much more, but that is for another time.