Gator By Gator
As referenced in the last post, my cleanup of the big mess has been going slow. As I can get away from the other areas in the forest, I spend time cutting the wood into 16 inch pieces. Many times they still need to be split once, twice or three times to make them small enough to lift.
While I have a good deal of wood cut and now split into pieces they are piled off to the side so Mike can still yard trees through the area without snagging on the rest of those pieces I have not yet gotten to. It is a lot of dancing around each other during these last few weeks of logging while we are on fire season restrictions.
On those days that I have the opportunity to have time once out of the woods after fire watch is over for the day. I can get a Gator load split into chunks and get them stacked onto the growing pile of wood that will be ready to wrap for the firewood project during the wintertime.
Gator by Gator is a slow way to proceed with a big pile for our winter supply, but the pile has been growing steadily.
What would we do without our gators? Ours we call “Tigger.” This year, our stack of logs for firewood was stacked close to our firewood storage, aka the garage. The firewood trailer we normally use holds almost a cord of wood and requires someone (me) to climb up and down into it to retrieve the middle pieces. My back was complaining, so we decided to try loading the cut pieces into Tigger, back it into the garage, unload it with no bending over or climbing into and out of. It did take six Tigger loads to equal the large trailer, but it was so much better ergonomically for a couple of old folks.
Those little tricks do help those hard working bodies!