Lumberjackin' in the Asian Collections and Dogwoods

We had our own little pre-break project this morning, the staffs from the Asian Collections and Dogwoods. We finally got rid of the large Hemlock that had fallen across from the Dogwood Overlook....in February. That took less than 20 minutes for the six of us. It took a bit longer for Pat and Nate to slice up the bole of the giant fallen Cedar in the Asian Collections, but it's finally gone. Pat put the long bar on our large chainsaw and it still wasn't long enough. In the picture, Pat is about 5 cuts ahead of Nathan, who is following up Pat's large cuts and severing the slab. The slabs are thin to keep the weight manageable. Still don't know what we'll do about that vertical stump. A suggestion was made that we use an air spade to remove the soil so we can just saw it up. I think it's un-grindable. The air spade seems preferable to spending long painfully difficult hours doing a bad job of removing the soil with mattocks. But then I'm lazy. Anyway we made a bit of progress today.

Two separate counts of the rings yielded two different ages for the tree, I think 61 and 74 years. At least something's older than I am.