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Blowdown root ball

Evidence of inexperienced feller

Tree in the road

Understory in a beetle-killed grove beginning to grow back

Wild Strawberry

I took a run up to Fayette Lake out of Sweeney Creek.  It was a cold morning and snowing quite a bit. This is a great place for logging, big groves of lodgepole have faced a little less than 50% mortality rate and the area hasn't been logged very much.  It also has a pretty good road if you could get across the ford.  There were some experienced loggers, like whoever low stumped the blow down root ball at right and then bucked, and pulled all the pieces.  There were also some inexperienced loggers up here.  At one point someone inexpertly felled a large lodge pole with a huge canopy directly into the road and left it.  I can see from the stump that they couldn't keep the tip of the bar level when they cut the tree.  Instead, the tip was dipping lower than the powerhead.  This prevents the back cut from cleanly meeting the wedge cut, creating a poor hinge, and reducing the ability of the feller to direct the tree as it falls.  In this case it fell correctly perpendicular with the hinge wood, but I wonder why the feller put it into a road and didn't clean it up.

Lodgepole bark from a porcupine

Bitterroot

Ant hill with water bottle for scale

Just before I crossed Sweeney Creek, I saw the tail feathers of an endangered sage grouse duck as it ducked behind a thicket.  I followed it to try to get a picture but the brush and trees were so thick it outdistanced me.  I saw the evidence of a porcupine recently eating the bark off a live lodgepole, but didn't find any quills.  There were also a number of giant red thriving red ant hills.  They love the sage brush to make their piles.

A fine meal of venison followed by a great shit

It looks like a large predator recently got a large elk.  I saw the remains, a leg and hoof and a large scat full of elk hair.  Blood was still draining from the leg bone and there was a small pool soaked into the ground.  This was probably a bear or lion.  I didn't stick around to look for tracks or the main carcass.

Fayette lake up and to the left through the snow

There was a bluff with an incredible vista.  I could see Fayette, Half Moon, Little Half Moon, Soda, Little Soda, Fremont, and Willow lakes from the same vantage point.  I tried to take some panorama vista shots with all the lakes but they didn't turn out.  The trail down to the lake had a bit of deadfall and some erosion but was mostly passable. 

Sailing on Fremont

Robin outside my bedroom window.

After the Fayette Lake trip I did a bit of sailing on Fremont with my friend.  It was snowing and hailing on us and the wind was very unstable so we kept it short.


The next day my mother and I mulched all the trees with 2 pickup truck loads of mulch.  Then I spent the rest of the day repacking my tools and equipment.  The next morning a robin greeted me with it's song, I ate a quick breakfast and headed back to Denver.

Pinedale and the surrounding area are truly world class for plants, wildlife, and recreation.  I am glad I had an opportunity to enjoy them this summer.  However, the best part of this trip for me was working with friends and family.

Darby Creek

Arriving at Darby Creek

Hitching post and beautiful flowers (is it a currant bush?)

I went out to Idaho to help some long time friends of the family (and friends of mine) with some tree trimming.

The Brown's place on Darby Creek is a very special place.  When I approached, all that I could see was a non-descript shed and a hitching post.  Shire Brown greeted me as his parents are currently in Switzerland.  Shire strikes me as an earnest, sensitive, articulate young man, somewhere in his mid twenties.  It had probably been 15 years or longer since I had seen him last.

The obvious 8 lane highway into Darby Creek

The Darby Creek overpass with tourist overlook pullout

Creeks run and foot bridges run across them.  Cedar shingles and old plants and old buck fences and old rare poppies abound.  Red lichen encases all of the old stuff as a testament to its age.  I love it here.  I saw the mother of the hops plants that we have back in Pinedale.  Over 20 years ago my father dug a clipping and it now surrounds our house as well.  This is the same hop plant we hope will encase the new pergola.  There was a nice stand of river birch next to the guest house with white peeling beautiful bark.  I had reminded myself to take a picture of the stand but somehow I forgot.

Darby Creek

To get to the main house, guest house, woodshed and other outbuildings requires stepping through a green curtain of trees and other plants through a shadowed path.  From the outside, the place is completely hidden by the plants.  The path to the house looks like a rarely used game trail.  I hiked in the 100 feet or so and widened it a bit with my considerable size.  Shire treated me to a cup of strong delicious black coffee and we re-introduced ourselves and caught each other up on our lives and families as much as possible in half an hour.  Then we got to work.

The Job

Lichen covered moose antlers, buck fence, wild rose (not yet bloomed)

Gordon Brown (Shire's father) and I have been discussing this job through email correspondence for a long time, perhaps a year.  The enormous P. angustifolia (narrow leaf cottonwood) had a number of large limbs, many of them dead, looming over the guest house and woodshed from high above.  Gordon has been concerned that their eventual fall will result in significant damages to the property.  He had sent me some pictures but they really didn't do the situation justice.  The trees and limbs were larger and more precarious in person.

Shire expertly dismantles large limbs with a chainsaw

Shire had no experience with tree work, but is an accomplished climber and mountaineer so he was able to assist me with very little training.  After a safety briefing, I ascended several of the trees and began removing all of the threatening dead limbs and many of the biggest and most threatening live ones.  Shire hooked and unhooked the necessary equipment from my climbing line as I was aloft and trimming.  We both wore helmets and I wore a harness with a redundant tie-in system in full OSHA compliance.

As I dropped limbs, Shire further dismantled them and organized them.  Eventually I worked my way to the top of the forest canopy, dense as individual canopies overlapped.  By that time the wind had come up quite a bit and there was up to 6 feet of play in the tree due to the wind.

On swaying trees

A giant twisted cottonwood sways in the wind differently than any other species.  This is because the truck is not straight like a ship's mast, but typically grows with a tilt in one direction for 5 or 10 feet and then a tilt in a different direction for the next several feet.  This irregular tilting growth continues to the top of the tree.  Each section of the growth tapers to the next section.  The result of the irregular jointed shape of the trunk results in the top describing a highly irregular motion as each varying section of the tree moves in a different direction in response to the wind and inertial forces of their adjoining sections.  What it means for a human at the top of one of these in high wind is that it moves all over the place with no apparent rhyme or reason.  Having been in a number of these cottonwoods, I can anticipate some of these movements and I also allow myself to gently sway with the tree comfortably rather than freezing, or fighting, or falling off.  The swaying of a cottonwood reminds me of a spirograph or the crazy office toys that move in erratic directions.


Why Cottonwood sways erratically (photo cred to Ivy from Flikr)

Large straight trunked conifers sway in the wind like a ship's mast in high seas.  As a wave comes underneath the ship, the mast tips away from the approaching wave, stands straight up as the peak of the wave passes under the ship, and then points away from the departing wave.  At the trough of the wave again the mast stands straight up.  Large conifers are pushed by the wind and then snap back, over compensating into the wind.  I have been in a 100 foot tall spruce with 15 feet or so of sway in strong winds, but the tip describes a line segment in the same direction as the wind.  Even when the wind seems steady, the conifers sway a lot as they move with and against the wind.  Old sailors in a crows nest at the top of a ships mast experienced the same movement.

Oaks, ash, and willow in high winds are pushed in the direction of the wind by their canopies and are held there in place as long as the wind is steady.  Then as the wind drops off, they move back into a straight up position.  I find these trees the least interesting in swaying in high winds.

High winds while climbing would terrify me and cause me to cancel tree trimming 10 or 15 years ago.  Now I feel gently rocked, awed and appreciative of these giant life forms.

I don't know how tall palm trees sway in the wind as I have never climbed one.

Back to the job

The author eyeing the most difficult limb removal of the day (cred to Shire w/ my phone)

There was one 25% dead limb that particularly threatened the guest house.  This limb was about 40 feet long and a foot and half in diameter where it joined the tree.  It was particularly difficult to remove as there was no growth above it to tie myself into or rig drops from.  I gracelessly shimmied out on this limb and cut giant heavy pieces from it.  I tied these pieces and ran the rope through a carabineer attached to a sling attached further up to a branch and then run through a friction device attached to an anchor attached to the base of the trunk and then run out to Shire who did an admirable job belaying them down.  He belayed somewhere between 6 and a dozen pieces of 100 pounds or more slowly and safely to the ground.  Uncontrolled their fall could easily demolish a structure.  There is a lot more stored potential energy in a tall tree than most people realize.  I once felled a 100 pound limb from 60 feet up in a lombardi poplar into a concrete car pad and punctured right through it.

Eventually we finished clearing the branches and I left all of the debris for Shire to clean up and organize.  I packed out all of the gear over the bridges and flowing creeks back out to the truck and headed home.

Shire and I cut the canopy from above the guest house and wood shed.  At the start of the day, little sky was visible, but by the end there was a giant circle of sky.  I told Shire that in a year or 2 the canopy of the existing trees will envelop the space, growing to capture any light for photosynthesis.  In several years they will start to grow in girth and in a decade or 2 tree trimming will be necessary again.  Cottonwoods drop enormous limbs as a part of their growth process and evolutionary heritage.  They are great examples of CODiT (Compartmentalization Of Disease in Trees).  When a limb is weak or dying, cottonwoods restrict resources to it and it dies and drops off the tree.  Here in rural Wyoming along creek beds one can see huge vibrant cottonwoods with many giant dead limbs below.  This makes large cottonwoods an especially problematic tree around homes.  Properly managed, they can be dealt with and I hope I helped at Darby Creek.

Trip to Jackson Hole

Laying out and nailing Gazebo rail pickets

I was traveling the last couple of days so I have some catch up posts to do.  I cut and attached the last of the log gazebo pickets.  The concrete post footers cured up nicely.


Loading the boat at Jackson Lake, under the Tetons

Launching the "Compensator" in Jackson Lake

After finishing this job I headed up to Jackson Hole to meet up with some friends up there before I went to Idaho.  They had purchased a ski boat the previous season and we worked on getting it ready for its maiden launch.  I brought a pretty good portable shop and we used a few of my tools to get the thing up and running.  This involved pulling the anti-freeze from the manifolds, flushing the bilge, running out the fog oil from the winterization of the engine, and properly resetting the drain plugs before running.

Jackson Lake is amazing.  It is in Teton National Park but they allow motorboats on the lake.  The lake sits underneath the mountain range much closer than any of the road view points.  As night fell, the shadows of the mountains covered the lake and dominated.  This is one of the most beautiful lakes combined with a mountain view that I have ever seen.

Rob doing a bit of water skiing in 45 degree waters

 On the way out we had a close encounter with a cow elk.

Side Job Haiku



Dirt and gravel piles
TomTom spreads them into place
Client writes a check



10 yards of pea gravel

TomTom loading pea gravel





Stitched panorama, loading dirt into the trailer with TomTom, and wishing I had a dump trailer later

Gazebo Rails

Holes

New narrow leaf poplars on the North Side of the cabin

I started this morning by digging some holes for trees.  Holes are a challenge in the rocky landscape on Orcutt Hill.  I dug out several large rocks and moved my holes to accommodate others.

Tall skinny lodgepole panorama

After the holes were dug, my mother and I ran new drip irrigation off the main line to the holes.  We went in to town and purchased the trees, which look to be 10 footers or so.  Planting went smoothly, though I was a bit nervous as a badger has been digging very close and has accumulated a pile of bones of things it has eaten under the cabin porch.

I got a call about a local landscaping job I will be taking tomorrow.  The client has 8 yards or so of peat gravel and another large pile of top soil she wants moved and distributed.  I took a look after lunch and accepted the job on an hourly rate.



Putting together another log deck

There were still a few hours left in the day, so I headed back up to Kelly Park for another round of logging the versatile Pinus contorta or lodgepole pine.  Again, I was able to harvest almost everything from the leavings of unskilled and careless loggers.  The lodgepoles here can be 6 inches wide and 60 feet tall.  This makes them ideal for tipis and other log construction as they are thin, strong and have very little taper.  This stand was so dense that it was a challenge to walk through without brushing trunks or getting stuck.  The dense stands fully prohibiting the growth of any understory.  Given time they will choke out all other species of tree in ground favorable to their growth.   Lone lodgepoles can be huge trunked full canopied trees.  Lodgepoles are a testament to the environment shaping the development of an organism independent of its genetic potential.

In the stand I was cutting in Kelly Park, there was quite a bit of recent blow down (trees blown over in the wind).  This phenomena is often observed in forests that are recently depleted.  The forest itself has always acted as a windbreak in the past, so the individual trees have never experienced the wind stress necessary to promote stabilization root growth.  When some of the forest is removed (in this case by the pine beetle), the inner trees are newly exposed to wind and their weak roots can't keep them upright.  I am a bit sad to see this stand change as I recall it in its dense quiet glory vividly 20 years ago.  However, it is not necessarily bad for the environment.  Even the poor techniques of the previous loggers will provide a lot of habitat for local creatures.  In addition, the understory is starting to develop once again.

Partially constructed gazebo rails

After loading up the logs on my truck's ladder rack, I drove them back to the house and laboriously walked them out to the gazebo.  Then it was time to work on the gazebo rails.  I got done with most of them but wasn't quite able to finish them today.


Working on the gazebo rails

Day off

Rare Wyoming Old Growth Doug Fir

I took the day off from work today.  I slept most of the morning away.  Eventually I woke in the afternoon and went hiking, so this post is less of a landscaping and more of a nature walk post.

Since there is still so much snow in the high country, I went hiking above Half Moon Lake on the Sweeney Creek trail.  I will hike into the high mountains if they are passable, so being here at this time of the season forces me to do more low country hikes.  This is one of my favorites.



What a giant specimen of Mules Ear!  This is about 3 feet wide

Larkspur (blue), Buckeye (yellow), and Phlox (white)

I noticed incredible wildflowers on this hike.  Again the mules ear flower dominated the landscape.  The aroma of the flower smells to me like a combination of cinnamon and cracked black pepper.  Walking through a field of them is beautifully overwhelming.  On the far slopes of Fremont lake, the area that burned is covered in them right up to the burn line where it changes to dense sagebrush.  I have some fear that I am miss-identifying arrowleaf balsamroot as mules ear.  I will go back up with a reference book tomorrow to be sure.  If I have made such a mistake I will update all posts.



Another lovely larkspur

Alpine Phlox, one of the earliest blooming wildflowers

I also saw larkspur, dandelions, alpine phlox, some other kind of phlox, buckeye flowers, blue bells and lupine (though most of the lupine is not yet blooming).  There were also a number of flowers I couldn't identify.  Unfortunately my mother was not there to identify them for me.  She has a log of a walk she took around Green River Lake in 1991 where she identified and wrote down the names of more than 40 species of flowers.  I am still trying to learn mine.

Brown Mourning Cloak butterfly


All these wildflowers bring out my favorite insects, the pollinators.  I saw many monarch butterflies and a few of the more exotics.  I also saw and heard the buzz of many bees.  A giant bumblebee bumbled over to my orange ball cap and rode along with me contentedly for a few dozen steps.


Sweeney Creek Ford

Lodgepole deadfall crossing

Classic Pinedale landscape: sage, granite boulders, aspen, lodgepole

Sweeney Creek was raging with water.  I could hear the rapids well before I came upon the ford.  Last year some of my family and I backpacked to the Sweeney lakes from which this creek originates in early August and it was barely a trickle.  Right now I think it is a dangerous torrent.  I once took a girl hiking here and she lost one boot when we tried to cross the ford at a similar time of year.   We saw a recent mule deer placenta a short ways upstream of the ford.  This is certainly the time of year for the big game births.  I saw a pair of pronghorn kids on the drive out that appeared born very recently.  The doe allowed my truck to pass within just a few feet of her which is rare for this skittish species.

Just before crossing on a lodgepole deadfall, I walked across the remains of an ancient beaver dam.  It looked to cross the whole creek at about 80 feet long, and 4 feet high and wide.  They are truly an industrious species.  Sufficient sediment has built up behind the dam to create a great berm that is now sporting lodgepole saplings.

Tall thin stand of mostly dead lodgepoles

Ancient Beaver Dam Remains

Across the Sweeney Creek is the perfect place for timber harvesting, a large grove of dense beetle killed lodgepoles.  Tree pros jokingly describe such a place as being so available we could "fell 'em right into the truck bed".  In this case truly no log skidding would be required to harvest several dozen cords.  I might have risked the crossing with my truck and harvested here if I had done this hike before we had gathered logs for the gazebo. 

Here, as in most of Colorado, the rocky mountain pine beetle has done its damage and disappeared.  That lack of dead needles on any of the beetle kill indicates that they died several years ago.  Even in the worst hit stands it doesn't look like they took more than 50% here.  There are advantages to this so called scourge in that it performs natural stand thinning.  Lodgepole is an apex tree species so this allows many of the others to have a chance.  I saw one Douglas Fir surrounded by beetle killed lodgepole.  Since its competitors for water have died, the canopy of the fir looks full and vibrant.

Deep into the hike there is a giant lichen covered granite boulder that overlooks Half Moon Lake.  A large marmot has taken residence here and scolded me loudly when I ascended it to take a picture.  I made my intrusion short.

Half Moon Lake view from a boulder

More Log Gazebo

Log Gazebo (and bench)

Log Gazebo (side view)

We made major progress on the landscaping today.  We finished the major structure of the gazebo, adding the second beam and all of the top rails.  We drilled the top rails in with 5 and 7 inch lag bolts and mostly had to pre-drill pilot holes.  The big challenge we faced today was getting the 18 foot rails up on top of the beams.  We would work together to get one end up on one side and then walk the other one up the ladder to get to the top. 



Looking up at the Gazebo near sun set

None of the logs are straight.  None of the logs are the same length or diameter.  Several of the posts, beams, and rails show the original chainsaw cuts used to fell the trees.  Working with these organic materials is an interesting experience and requires many specific cuts and hardware.  In some cases, I drilled large holes to inset a lag bolt head when the 7 inch bolt would not get much purchase past a 6 inch log.

It was a cold spring day and by noon the wind was rushing and knocking down our ladders as we worked to erect the gazebo.  The forecast calls for temperatures of 39 degrees tonight, and I hope it doesn't freeze as that may compromise the curing of the concrete footers.

Pergola, Gazebo, Buck Fence, Clothesline and Benches

Gazebo through new trellis on old pergola

In the afternoon we moved the whole workshop from the gazebo back to the garage to make outdoor furniture.  My mother really likes benches and furniture put together from scraps.  She wanted several of these made as part of the landscaping project this summer.  Kian, Patrick, and I put four of these together, mostly from the top 4x4 posts remains used to construct the pergola, the bracing used to keep the pergola up under construction, and various scrap wood in Dad's collection from many projects past.  I love these small, over constructed scrap benches. 

Kian is very interested in construction and carpentry so I showed him a few things today.  By the end of the day I could call out that I wanted a 2x6 marked up at 37 and 3/4s and he was able to find the board, measure and mark with a pencil, finish his mark with a carpenter's square, and affix the piece to the saw horse with a wood clamp in preparation for the cut.  He even marked the waste side with an 'X' so I knew which side of the line to put the kerf.  We cut most of the pieces on my Dad's extremely high quality industrial Delta compound miter saw bolted to the garage work bench.  It cuts 4x4 square posts like a dream.  Marking and cutting was so efficient that my brother set up a second drill and drill bit for setting screws in the bench assembly process.  The shop was humming with drills, circular saws, miter saws, hammers, and belt sanders.



Dry Rock River Bed

Patrick and Kian are headed back to Hawaii tomorrow.  Lil, my mother and I will remain to continue landscaping tasks.  I think more logging, more tree planting, and additional irrigation line installation are in our future.