Most of our days consist of normal tree work. Whether that’s pruning trees for a better view of Lake Huron or reducing over extended limbs to mitigate risk for our clients. But then, every once in a while we get those calls that really make us sit down at the “ol’ drawing board” and put our thinking caps on! In all honesty, I really do use a giant white board in the shop to concoct some of these off the wall ideas of how to reduce the manpower and increase our mechanical power to make jobs run smoothly. So, below I’ll explain the situation we found ourselves in and how we used brain power and physics to make our job easier and more efficient!
I received a call to remove a large Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus) from behind a historic mansion. Unfortunately the tree started showing signs of decline and the owner was worried the tree could potentially fall onto the 80 year old slate roof causing irreversible damage. I stopped out and agreed with the client’s worries and thats when the brainstorming began!
To get to the location of the tree I needed to walk along a brick paver pathway surrounded by antique lighting, next to a massive plate glass window, down a steep and treacherous stairway, further down the steep hill and then traverse the hill to finally make it to the base of the tree which then towered 80’ above me. My first thought… “How in the hell are we going to get this wood out of here?!?!” Luckily, we could lower limbs and brush and use a pull line to haul the smaller pieces onto the pathway but there was no way we could pull this large diameter wood onto the pathway. This is when I started to put together a plan in my head!
We were fortunate that the logs could just be dropped in large 15-20’ sections without causing any root damage to nearby mature trees. This allowed Joe Drinkhorn, the climber, to move quickly through the large wood instead of slowly and meticulously lowering down smaller more manageable pieces. The first day consisted of just getting the tree down onto the ground. The next morning we started to put our plan into action.
The plan was to create a high line, think of that zip line that you went on in Costa Rica, but instead of a screaming and laughing human on the line it’s a 300-400lb White Pine log that is slowly being lifted uphill and lowered onto the top of the hill. Kinda cool, huh? The first goal was to secure a line in a large Red Oak (Quercus rubra) that was stable enough to endure the large amount of vector forces the high line would be witnessing. We also needed this line to be anchored higher than the top of the hill but not too high because it would cause too much belly in the high line before the pieces of White Pine actually started to move uphill. We then ran the same line through a block at top of the hill that was anchored 15’ off the ground in a sturdy Eastern Hemlock. That same line was ran through another block at the base of a White Pine that would redirect the line onto the driveway. We attached another rope to the original line just on the driveway side of the rope that allowed us to get a straight pull with our Ditch Witch SK-600 mini skid steer. This line was attached to the Ditch Witch with a mini Port a wrap to make line tensioning, extension and retraction easier.
We had a large White Pine removal that required us to move the logs up a large steep hill. We used a high line to easily move the logs uphill with the least amount of human effort. Check out the video for how we made it happen!
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At this point we started cutting the logs into 2-3’ section and attaching a sling around them. We then used a Petzl Tandem pulley as our trolley on the high line and clipped a pull line into the Tandem. So in theory, once the sling was attached to the Petzl Tandem, I would tension and attach the rope to the Ditch Witch and slowly back up. As I backed up the high line would become tensioned and would slowly pull the log across the ground until the belly came out of the high line. At this point the log would go airborne and would slowly slide on the trolley to the top of the hill. The grounds person at the top of the hill would pull the log an extra 2’ with minimal effort and I would then pull the mini skid forward which would create another belly in the high line and lower the log onto the brick paver walkway. All of this was done with massive amounts of communication through our Sena bluetooth headsets. I can’t imagine doing this job without the head sets as most of the work was out of eye sight for myself and the other employees. Communication was paramount.
So over the course of 5 hours we removed all of the wood from down the steep and dangerous hill. If we had to cut this wood into manageable pieces and carry it uphill, I don’t think I would have any employees and surely wouldn’t have any friends left! This was a great opportunity to think outside of the box and put a plan together that worked out for the client, my employees and myself. Thanks again to Joe, Richard, and Donny for helping make this job possible! Check out the video for a better visualization of what was going on and how it all came together!