Junk Tree

[TK48states]

In 1998 I bought an old farmstead in Adams County Colorado, it had a lot of big trees, ornamental pines and "chinese elms". The pines soon got killed by bark beetles from wood I had cut in the mountains but the elms which were already fully grown just got bigger and older and more gnarly. Those elms turned out to be Siberian elms and are a continuing nuisance. Siberian elms are supposed to be a dry climate tree but I'm here to tell you they grow like mad when planted next to a flowing ditch lateral with an unlimited supply of water, mine are now 150" with a girth of 30-36 inches. Branches and limbs are continually dying and falling off or getting caught yet the trees seem to thrive, a windstorm results in litter everywhere and a so called a derecho storm two years ago did some real damage splitting trunks and tearing off big limbs, a huge clean up job. So what is the point here? In early March my tenant in a rental house there said he was worried about a huge limb which had grown over the entire roof of his house. March is the windy season here and he was right to be nervous, I started looking for an arborist and couldn't get anyone to come out and look finally decided I'd have to do the job myself, a scary thought (see photos). Was going to rent a crane but still would need to get out on limb to hook up lifting bar or also rent a cherry picker. I've felled lots of trees over the years but not one with the potential to crash through the entire roofline of a house. After a couple of days of study decided to go at it with two half inch cables, pulley blocks and a tractor and a Bobcat, all depending on the integrity of the main trunk to hold the blocks and not fracture. Figure that limb weighed ten tons, alive not dead, supported by two cables strategically placed was able to gently lower it onto roof where plywood sheathing had been placed over shingles. The limb dragged the 50 hp Kubota tractor and the pickup it was chained to a few feet as I took off cable tension but stopped before any damage done to roof and the main trunk held and I was able to delimb and cut up trunk into manageable sections up on the roof. Would I do it again? No.

 

[MMG]

Like Mike Rowe once said, “if safety were #1, nothing would ever get done”.
Men are paid (or not) to take care of things that need taken care of.
I’m glad it all worked out.

 

[old CB]

Wow, that is quite the heavy limb. Glad it worked out for you. It's often dicey, as I think you learned, to anchor a tree or limb to a vehicle, as what seems to be a heavy tractor can be overmatched by the weight of the wood. Lots of photos and YouTube videos of vehicles getting yanked backwards by trees. Better to anchor to a substantial tree (if you have one in the necessary location), and even at that I pulled a couple of anchor trees out of the ground during my pro days.

I'm a neighbor, so to speak, up in Boulder County. Have cut my share of Siberian elm.

 

[Del_]

I'm glad it worked out good but do a few of those and somebody is going to get killed.

The guy that made the cut that laid the limb on the house was risking his life big time.

 

[TheJollyLogger]

Yeah, glad it went well, but yall dodged a bullet there, for sure.

 

[CutsThroughKnots]

Sounds like you did some creative rigging, glad you pulled it off and no one got hurt. Gonna take a look at some of those little shoots poking out the trunk of a few of my trees. A garden lopper is a lot easier to deal with at this point. In a few years things will get more complicated.

 

[ATH]

That is truly a nasty limb!