Crosscut Musings
July 24, 2019
July 10, 2019
Yesterday, we as a crew saw our Sierra Institute partners do some felling. There are two different types of cutting trees, bucking and felling. Bucking is cutting trees that have fallen or have been cut down while felling is arguably more fun. It involves cutting down trees. We as a conservation group cannot operate chainsaws because we are in a protected wilderness area and it is banned to used mechanized equipment here. In our crew, only four of us are crosscut trained. Everyone enjoyed watching the trees fall, while crosscutters paid more attention to techniques used for felling since we were only trained to buck. After the demonstration, some of us stayed behind to admire and learn more of felling saws. A key difference to be simple is that a felling saw has a curved beck, it is thinner and more flexible than a bucking saw. Anyways, we returned back to work to remove stumps. This is possibly the most annoying and the most frustrating version of crosscutting. Our crew of crosscutters can usually remove 13 whole logs while bucking in a day. Not too shabby. On the other hand, low stumping took us multiple days and on average we cut four and a half stumps per day. That alone should be enough to describe how difficult low stumping can be. To be fair to the crew, our crew had the worst saw of the three that were available. Not to name names but (Gustavo) our saw was not tuned or sharpened by our friend, Dolly. As a whole, our experience as crosscutters and crew members has been extremely enjoyable.
Justin, 16 – Westwood
Luis, 16 – Oakland
