Had a dead pine about 90’ from the house son and his fiancé live in. That was a problem being it was a bit over 100’ tall.
It was weighted toward the house, leaning toward the house, and nowhere to drop it other than on the road toward the house unless we took out several other good sized trees. That and I’m not a fan of pulling really hard to change the throw of dead pine because if you pull too hard sometimes they just break and then no telling what part of it is going where. All things considered it just needed to come down in two pieces.
I used to climb for a tree service back in the day but that was 35 years ago and I hated climbing dead pine with thick, unreliable bark then, much less now. So it was either rent a spider lift or call the man. Never used a tree service before but the son of an old friend has run a tree service about 25 years so I called him to see if he would just blow the top out of it and leave it laying. Agreed if he could stop by whenever he was in the area with his bucket truck anyway and had a little extra time he’d stop by and do it for about what it would have cost to rent a lift.
Didn’t see him do it, so I have no idea how he got a bucket truck down the switchback road to it without taking out at least a couple of adjacent sourwoods but he did. Then to the cleanup. 4 people, 1 saw, 1 L4701 with grapple and chipper, 3 hours after work and it was like it was never there (except for the stump).
My brother borrowed my stump grinder a few months ago to take out a couple of stumps at his place that kind of morphed into a couple dozen at his place. He’ll bring it with him when we see him at Easter, so I’ll take out the stump shortly.
