A biggun'
It was my biggest tree challenge yet - de-limbing and topping a 50ft Norway spruce. But it didn't quite go according to plan...
If you’re from the West coast of the continental states, a 50ft tree is a tiny thing. If you’re called Jamie and you’re from the North East coast of England, then a 50ft tree – especially your first 50ft tree, is far from teeny.
Recently I’ve been working with a friend on one of his jobs. A clear-felling job for the local wildlife trust to remove four acres of Norway spruce so that it can be re-planted with native broadleaves. The site is classified as a plantation on ancient woodland (PAWS) and so returning the woodland back to broadleaf from non-native timber stocks is a long term gain for local wildlife and ecology. A short-term loss for sure, as there’s something about conifer woodlands. However, with a site like this there’s only one way forward – fell it all and start over. Approaches like “continuous cover” wouldn’t work on this site because reasons. You can see what the site looked like around the start of January 2024. Keep your eyes peeled for a shed…
Before this site was handed over a to a local wildlife trust it belonged to an avid bird watcher and there is a shed-come-bird-hide that had been there for years. In fact, most of the locals knew this place as “the conifer woodland with the shed”. As creepy as the shed was (and it was creepy) it was a feature. Despite hundreds of trees being felled around it, amazingly, the shed didn’t receive a single bump or knock.
Last week we had felled all of the remaining trees apart from one – the biggest one on the site. Because of the location of this tree on the site, it received more sunlight than any other tree and it whilst it wasn’t that much higher than the other trees, it was much fatter than the rest. The biggest tree I felled on that site came in at 71 cm in diameter. This tree was just over 100cm. It was massive and it was leaning right over that shed. Whilst felling trees is fun and practice is always required, I’m always looking for an opportunity to get more practice over a range of skills. So I had an idea. John made it clear that this tree was his. It was the biggest on the site and he’d earned it.
But the shed thing bothered us both. It managed to survive unscathed and we both had a sense that no matter what we did when felling it, the thing had so much weight on it that it was going to hit or crush the shed. So what to do? I offered to spike up the tree and remove the limbs and knock the top out. John would then fell the remaining stick. It was a win win. I get the practice, John gets the glory.
De-limbing stuff and knocking the top out off things for some reason feels like a rite of passage and when I suggested it, I felt like the time was right for me to check “de-limbed and topped big conifer” off my list of learning experiences. So when I rocked up on a Sunday morning I was raring to go. I got my gear on and “got amongst it”. If you’ve ever watched this kind of thing on being done before, it looks pretty quick. I was expecting the de-limbing and topping of this tree to take me an hour – maximum.
De-limbing a conifer is pretty standard practice. Spikes on, strop/lanyard/flipline1 out and you spike up the tree, removing the limbs as you go. The spikes keep you from falling down and the strop allows you to keep a pressure between you, the spikes and the tree. In other words, it keeps you up. However in order for it to work well, there needs to be two things present. The first, is a nice round trunk free of objects that “catch” the strop as you “flip” it upwards. The second, is a well honed strop technique. It turns out that I had neither. But whilst I was doing it, I thought that I had at least a half decent strop technique.
Watching the video footage back is painful. About five metres up I realised I had left something on the ground. John, my groundie, was assisting some visitors loading timber onto their trailers. So I came down to get the thing I’d left on the ground and then set the camera up to record my ascent on a tripod. A five metre ascent with a rope and lanyard took me nearly four minutes – it probably should take less than 30 seconds. The footage is below if you also wish to be tortured. It’s like watching a new born horse struggling to walk.
Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not beating myself up. I’m just critically observing and acknowledging that the gap between my actual skill level and my perceived skill level is once again made quite apparent to me. It’s funny how climbing always does this to me. This is what learning is, a function where perceived gains and apparent losses are input into some mysterious algorithm and an increment of new skill is the output.
If you look at the trunk, you can see bumps. These are the branch collars and that’s what my strop was getting caught on. This, and my newbie technique, prevented me from moving the strop up quickly and methodically. So moving up and around the tree took me more time than I had imagined it would. The climbing line worked a treat and I soon figured out it was easier to just ascend up the line and “walk” up the tree where flipping the line was difficult. One I was back up though, I found my groove. Not a very fast groove, but a groove none the less.
I’d put my secondary line on a nice fat branch about one foot above my head and then descend a bit and position myself using the strop and my spikes so that I was nice and comfortable. Then I’d cut everything that was within reach of me. When there was nothing left to cut within reach, I’d move around the stem and cut some more until there was nothing left for me to cut. Then I’d climb up past my secondary line until it was about waist height, using the branches as ladders. I’d find another branch about a foot above my head and move the secondary climbing line and descend back down and start cutting. Rinse and repeat.
I was experiencing a mixture of “loving it” (80%) and “bricking it” (20%). I suspect the more I do this, I can get that bricking it down to a respectable and healthy sub one percent. People who have done this for a while tell me that you need a little bit of bricking it to keep you on your toes and to keep your safety game on point.
To be clear though the “bricking it” thoughts do tend to allow the inner doubt to creep in. “You can’t do this”, “this is not for you”, “you’ll never be good at this” . They’re the usual suspects. You must not give into these thoughts. I tell them “I’ll just finish what I’m doing and then, if I agree with you, I’ll follow your advice”. That usually shuts them up for a few minutes.
I must have been right in the zone because two hours had passed. I had made it about three metres up from where I was in the above photo. However, I was still about three metres from being at a point where I could knock the top out of the tree. The plan was to drop the stem over the pond and make a nice bridge for birds and other creatures to enjoy. If I had simply removed the top where I was then the stem would have ended up being too short to make the bridge. It would have simply been a log in a pond, that we’d probably have to clean up, and we didn’t want that job. So I had more to cut.
Then my fuel ran out. I had to come back down to re-fuel and then I was reminded of the time. It was nearly time to leave the site for the day. So in the end I didn’t get to knock the top out of it - but I did manage to get about three quarters of the limbs off. Here’s a before and after.
I’ll not lie, I was very much looking forward to “riding the stick” when the top came out and ragged me about on the stem, but it was not meant to be. John got the 462 out with the 36” bar and felled that tree right over the pond. It was the last tree to be felled on the site. John got his big tree and I got (nearly) the thing I was after. This is the things about trees - they teach you things about yourself. Every time I’ve worked on a tree I’ve learned at least one thing about the tree and one thing about myself.
On this task I learned that Norway spruce (Picea abies) is very, very sappy (sapier than a teenage girl on valentines day) and is in fact so sappy, that it will lock your climbing system up to the point that descent becomes nearly impossible. What I learned about myself is that I’m on the road to being a competent climber, but there’s still some journey ahead of me. I have to cut myself some slack in this regard as I’m still not technically out of treeschool and so I haven’t really been climbing for any real period of time. If I was writing a report card for myself I’d probably give myself a B minus and the comment would be –
Jamie is an enthusiastic student who clearly has the will to get on and reach his potential. But he often attempts things beyond his current abilities. I want to give him an A for effort, but his desire to take on jobs outside his skill set leaves things undone, so he’s getting an overall B minus being pulled towards an A once he gets a little more practice under his belt and learns the limit of his abilities.
When this tree started growing in the late eighties neither it nor myself had any ideas we’d both learn something from each other. I’m always grateful to trees for this. I only hope it’s grateful to me for having respect in transitioning it from one state of its life to another.
I appreciate your attention.
I appreciate that tree.
Thanks for reading.
Cheers,
Jamie.
There are so many names for bit of climbing equipment in the world. Some people call it a lanyard, US / Canada people tend to call it a flip line (because you flip it up), however in the north east of England we call it a strop.
Getting rid of all the Norwegian trees, eh?
Sounds a lot like ethnic cleansing to me. I'm calling the UN.
But seriously; that big spruce looks to me like a terrible, useless tree. That picture of it after you've lopped off all the branches ... I look at all those stumps (branch collars!) and imagine how full of huge knots the planks inside would be. Useless! Not even very good as fire wood. Food for the chip-board mill. But felling it so the critters can use it to cross the river was brilliant :-)
They've planted a lot of Sitka Spruce along the West Coast here, but they're regretting that now, if I've understood things correctly. Now they want to get rid of them. I've never walked in a Sitka forest, but there's plenty of normal spruce around. They make such dark and miserable forests ... with their dead, black brances scratching at you like gangrenous fingers ...
I don't use much spruce in the shop, but it's what they use to build houses of here so it's the most common wood. I like clear and tight-grown spruce, tho'! Light and springy -- proper aircraft wood ... or spars for boats!
I'll shut up now :-)