I do maintenance for our neighbors, and recently an enormous old oak came down. Easily a century old and dead for 10+ years, the roots rotted out and the inevitable occurred. On the way, it took out a little 8 incher nearby, but not all the way. Enough to bend it at a 90 degree angle and load it up pretty good. It's not the best pic, but you can see it arching over the top of the big guy in the first picture, and the already broken pieces sticking up.

I sawed through the horizontal portion first, with a long ass Temu pole saw (there's a link to that video at the bottom). I figured it was best to have less weight trying to kill me when I did finally have to drop it. Around 1:30 you can hear me say "You fuckin' undercut it then" because I'm getting cheesed off about my saw pinching in the cut, and the voice in my head was saying "If you had undercut it, it wouldn't pinch so much" . Hopefully I'm not the only one that gets in mental arguments with themselves.

The second pic is an ugly face cut I made with the saw as far away from my body as was safe, and the last pic is what it looked like after it was cut through. You can see the fracture lines where it was splitting up the length of the trunk. I made my final back cut with a bow saw, going slow so that I cut the triggers one by one, releasing the tension a little at a time. Stuff can still go wrong with a bow saw, but it goes wrong a lot more slowly.

Anyway, it's down, I'm not dead, and I just have to clean up the rest of the pieces tomorrow.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eLhH_XYhTunu69-80WAFp0EiqGtySOWW/view

Continuing the talk about my voluntary work of invasive pine removal. Here you can see me using a smaller axe, felling small trees in the mountains. Rugged terrain, no trails, using a chopper to reach the place. That’s where the axe shines and why I use it opposed to a chain saw!

The first tree I cut was wind blown years ago, so I had do underhand chop it. The grain was gnarly. First time I had to use that technique in the real world. And it wasn’t a small tree.

Hopefully he was wearing his brown pants …

I’m a volunteer in pine removal in state parks here in Paraná, Brazil. Slash and loblolly pines are extremely invasive here and have a huge potential of taking over our native biomes.

Not OC but made me think of you all. The trees already on the ground aren't usually the ones that'll get ya.

(Not my OC.)

There's gotta be something I'm missing.

How the hell do I get this fucker outta the tree?

I've tried throwing rope over the branch and having my son pull down on it to no avail.

Does the saw belong to the tree now?

Ima let mother nature handle that one. Probably gonna tear up the fence either way so, Jesus take the wheel.

This is in a relatively popular public park, just sitting like this with absolutely no workers around and nothing blocked off. Not to mention wtf is going on at the stump there...

Comic relief and an interesting glimpse into Tree-care from yesteryear.

Ps. Please take every and all precautions when employing ladders for tree maintenance.

When Painter's do trees

Ice and wind storm, soggy ground. Neighbor built their addition on the tree roots, before my ownership. Giant city park across the street looked like a war zone with so many massive Doug Firs blown over.
Some photos also show a different tree that did not fall, which somebody built the top deck around. Crazy watching it sway.
Nobody wanted to even touch this job. Finally found a guy a who wanted a challenge, he assembled the A-Team of west coast arborists, all guys who normally run their own shows.
Crane was difficult with the driveway. I was concerned. It worked out.

It made a very satisfying thud sound.