#trailgnomes

On the six eggs trail, the section jump-scoop-jump (see other posts) passes a tall dead tree which is leaning towards the trail. This marks the end of the section we have built so far. The very last feature is the jump up out of the scoop. This has a landing that’s pretty flat. Immediately after that the track dips and runs out. There are chalk boulders and ferns to stop you abruptly. We’ll fix that soon.

This tree leaned over towards the take off and looked pretty rotten. It has dropped a large branch before. It sounded awful knocking on the trunk, some higher sections were hollow, some was just mush.

Because we expect the rest of this tree would fall onto the trail at some point, we decided to fell it and use the wood as filler for the dip.

We set out to do it quietly as it’s near to the main path, and we were doing this in the evening.

Because of the lean towards the trail and the rot being mostly on the lower side, I decided it was definitely safest to fell towards the trail. I checked carefully for sound wood while making a notch in the low side, stopping about 1/4 of the way into the trunk when it felt like I was finding some solid wood.

Marking around the trunk for the back cut helped me line up my cut, the tree was nearly double the saw blade.

While I was cutting, [redacted]* got a fire going.

It’s October, and the leaves all began falling around us, sounding like rain or footsteps. It was seriously surreal being in the dark surrounded by this noise until we realised what it was. The fire was hard to light and [redacted] had several goes with kindling he had brought before he managed to get it lit using a sandwich bag as a firelighter.

Back at the tree I made two back cuts to leave a triangle of supporting wood, before cutting straight towards the hinge. Gradually it felt like more solid wood than the surrounding mush. I left a fairly wide supporting hinge and then we gently pushed it over and immediately ran away.

I’m glad we did it this way, although the supporting wood was brittle and snapped rather than hinged, we controlled the direction reasonably well - but the lean certainly helped. What was left of the limbs smashed off as soon as it fell, which made things easier.

As you can see in the following photo, this was a large tree, small saw job.

It was so rotten it smashed into lots of pieces and was easy to collect and fill the dip.

Most pieces were very light, only the lowest part of the trunk has any significant weight. We should go back with a chainsaw soon to tidy up the trunk, but now it’s not ready to fall on the trail, everyone is safer.

We also cut up this limb from the same tree, which has been by the side of the trail for ages. This fell onto the jump to the right of the photo below.

Sausages were eaten, beer was drunk. Good times!