Tag Along with Us to Fell a 200’ Hazard Tree

Part of our trail restoration work in Big Basin Redwoods State Park has included a huge effort to remove hazard trees, which are loosely defined as trees that pose a direct safety concern.

Now, over four years since the CZU Lightning Complex Fire scorched Big Basin, the dead trees that remain standing are regularly falling all around us, even on no-wind days. And while there are several reasons why it’s valuable to remove hazard trees (forest health, fire management, etc.), our team’s core focus is making the forest a safe place for trail users to return to.

Some of these hazard trees are smaller, while others are massive and incredibly daunting. The other day, I tagged along for the felling of one of the more daunting ones. I took a few iPhone photos and learned quite a bit along the way. Check out what I saw…

A 45-minute, uphill hike with a 20lb saw thrown over your shoulder just to get to the job site. That hike takes more energy out of you than you might think.

This photo gives a lay of the land. The hazard tree was sitting right above the trail tread and the site of a brand new bridge we’re about to build. It was also on a hillside, and its natural lean was aiming right at the bridge site. This was a technical job for us, but one that the Trail Crew was excited to tackle.

Our Trails Superintendent, Jacob ‘Cob’ Hyde, drew the lucky number and took on the job. Here he is cutting in a notch for a springboard. You’ll also notice the charred bark has been shaved off all the way around the tree. We do this on the really burnt trees so when we’re making the cut, the saw isn’t spitting out a bunch of char dust, which is nasty to breathe and also reduces the visibility of your cut.

Note the absence of any new growth on this tree. This tree, unfortunately, didn't survive the CZU wildfires of 2020. All of the trees that survived that burn have new growth at this point (see, in the photo, the other trees to the right).

The last thing we want to do is cut down trees…1. Because trees are incredibly important for literally everything from ecosystem health to erosion control to producing the oxygen we breathe and so much more. And 2. Because it can be incredibly dangerous work to remove trees like this.

There’s the springboard in its notch. Back in the old days, when crosscut saws were how these trees were cut, springboards were used, mostly, to get the fellers up above the flared out bottom of trees to a skinnier part of the tree so there was a smaller diameter of wood to cut through. Cob used springboards for this job because it was the only way he was going to be able to get a level cut due to the steeper slope of the landscape.

Here’s Cob putting the face cut in. To get the tree to fall where he wanted it to go, he had to put the face cut essentially in the uphill side, away from its natural lean. Scroll through to see Cob just about maxed out on height before having to jump up on the springboard. We had a 36” bar on the saw, but a 60” diameter tree still required a two-part face cut. It’s really important to line up your corners on a face cut (the more perfect your face cut is, the more control you have over the direction your tree falls).

And here’s the start of the back cut. Marking your cut line makes life a little easier on trees this big and cuts this particular. It’s hard to see around the tree to line up with your face cut! We whacked in a bunch of wedges to prevent the tree from sitting back on itself. That’s Eamon Reynolds in the Roads and Trails shirt. He works with California State Parks and has quite a bit of experience taking down trees like this, so he was able to provide great guidance through this cut.

And then we broke out a new toy: a 53-ton @ 15,000psi Borntrager Tree Jack. These little things are pretty impressive machines and are typically used to better control the fall direction of the tree when there are other variables in the equation…like weight leaning the wrong way or if you really don’t want it to land on a trail and create days of clean up (like in our case here).

This tree didn’t need too much pressure so we cranked the jack up to ~5,000psi, then finished the back cut and let ‘er buck.

And there it is. 5’ across, on the dot. What do you think…150’, 200’ tall?

Some of my key takeaways:

• • This type of work isn’t fast. We started the hike out to the tree just before 8am. After a long hike out, lots of prep work, and a slower, educational approach….that final photo with the tree on the ground was taken at 12:22pm.

  • Some of you gnarly loggers out there might not have pulled out the treejack on this one. We thought it was the perfect situation for a trial run. We’re trail builders, not loggers, anyways…

  • A successful day = everyone making it home safe.

  • I made a video clip of the action, too.