Cleaning up storm damage

We were up at our usual 4:30 am, so we went back out on the deck to do some early morning stargazing. It is nice that there is a deck that goes the entire circumference of their house and has a sliding door from the guest bedroom out to the deck. There was still a good deal of smoke in the atmosphere, but the stars were great.

High winds on Friday afternoon put down or damaged about a dozen cottonwood trees to the point of endangering structures. Four trees were down in the chicken yard but fortunately did not do much damage to the chicken coop. One side of the fence received some damage but appears to be repairable. In addition to removing the four trees that were down in or on the chicken yard, we took three trees in the area down that were leaning toward the chicken coop, smokehouse or fuel tanks. Other trees fell near but not on the barn and did no damage. It could have been a lot worse.

I was very impressed with Mark’s Milwaukee cordless chainsaws. They did a great job of cutting the downed cottonwood into 18-inch lengths to fit into their fireplace. When the batteries for the saw were exhausted, I switched to the Stihl two cycle chainsaw to cut up the cottonwood. Our workflow had me falling and cutting up the trees and Mark hauling the logs off and stacking them near the fuel tanks. Mary and Cindy gathered tops and branches too small to be used as firewood and hauled them to the surround desert BLM land. They also piled the bed of Mark’s pickup with branches, small limbs and bark to be dumped in the sagebrush.

We were fortunate that the cottonwood was much easier to cut than the oak, ash and locust that we are used to cutting around home. The battery and gas powered saws had no difficulty cutting through cottonwood trees that were 20 inches in diameter. Once cut, the logs were also much lighter and easier to carry. We were laughing at the sight of Mary carrying a cottonwood branch that was 10 feet long and 8 inches in diameter.

We used a rope to direct the fall of a few of the trees to keep them from hitting any of the structures. Mark also used his Milwaukee cordless pole saw to take some dead limbs down that could fall on the fence. We finished the cutting and stacking before 3 pm then came in for showers and cold drinks after putting all of the tools away. It felt good to relax after a good day of cleanup.

Mark made an excellent stir fry for dinner. It had chicken with a lot of vegetables and Japanese noodles. We all enjoyed it very much. We finished up with some of Mark’s homemade ice cream then relaxed before bed. Mary and Cindy planned our three days at Yellowstone next week and we were all looking forward to tomorrow and leaving for Wyoming.