It was a cold morning, down in the low 20sF, so it took me a bit to get out and start work. I spent some of the morning dinking around in chatgpt. I've not found many good uses for the AI yet but now I think I have a good one. I asked for a story idea similar to a Douglas Adams book and I'll be damned if the thing didn't spit out a pretty solid concept. I've not had the drive to write for NaNoWriMo this year thanks to little creative juices bubbling and needed some kind of help. While the treatment it gave me is pretty solid I see a lot I can change to make my own.

Eventually I headed out to get to work. After having found the tree on the hill to drop I had my afternoon laid out for me. I had to get the chain sharpened on the saw first which nicely goes quite fast.

Then I hiked up the hill to the tree and decided that I wanted it to fall cross hill, 90 degrees away from the dramatic uphill lean. You can see the tree had a 10+ degree lean to it but the bulk of the branching as on the downhill side.

I made a strong face cut pointed right where I wanted the tree to go then I started my back cut and with the pair of wedges in I was able to fell the tree EXACTLY where I wanted it. You can see our hiking trail just above the tree.

I worked my way down the trunk limbing as I went.

Then I started bucking it to rounds from the top to the base.

I had about 20 feet of the trunk left and as I made a cut the thing began to roll downhill. I managed to keep it in place until I finished the cut then stepped aside and let the log roll until it slammed into the tree and stopped.

I was almost finished bucking the tree when I ran out of gas in the saw... I hadn't brought the gas with me thinking I wouldn't need more than a tank but that was not the case.... So down to the tool shed I went and then hiked my ass back up to the saw.

This is where the tip of the tree landed. Again exactly where I had wanted it to go.

Back at the saw with the gas and oil I soon had the main tree bucked. You can see that I was on the hill with an about 80 foot drop below. The tree rounds rolled down and then trundled the slope to the old road below. I watched some go then decided to leave most all of them for the boys to trundle once home from school.

One of my great memories from childhood was trundling all manner of stuff down our back hill, down the 100 foot tall boulder, and down various cliffs in the Sierras. I wanted to make sure my boys would have the opportunity for similar.

I had cut down a tree a couple weeks back and limbed it but had not bucked it so I hiked around the hill and took care of it. It's not in the best spot as there is tons of brush below the rounds got caught in as we tried trundling the rounds later.

Nearby I was scoping the trees overhead and decided to go ahead and drop more smaller live fir trees.

3 trees are down and will get limbed and bucked today.

The last tree I dropped was the one on the left and the tip of it was laying across the trail down. I hacked the top off and set it up to see that is would make one hell of a nice Christmas tree. Too bushy for us and the space available in the house though.

I called it good for the day and got cleaned up and showered before the boys got home from school. As soon as they did we went right for the hill where they had a blast kicking the rounds down the hill.

All but one round landed on the road, that one round went through the wires and off into the swale below where I will have to lug it up out of to load in the truck today.

We then hiked over to the other trees and the boys began hefting the rounds downhill.

You can see how dense it is below and those rounds didn't like trying to trundle through it all. There will be a lot of hillside thrashing about to get them all to the base to load.

I'm intent on trying to create some gaps in the trees to allow a bit more sunlight to hit the farm in Winter.

I had parked aside earlier in the day but it took until later for me to actually get the spot raked out so I could park back in my spot before @stryeyz got home from work.

We got a nice sunset and I got the fire going in the fireplace for the evening.

Got out to soak but again my dumb skin...

It's R's 8th birthday today and I will get the boys to school in a while. The trees on the hillside are awaiting my return and I will get the chain sharpened before I head up to work on them this morning. I'll load up all the rounds I can and haul them to the wood cover. Man Utd play mid day and likely will get embarrassed yet again so I will probably not watch to save myself the annoyance.

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