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Outdoor Corner: Black Spruce challenge
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The little train that could! Happiness is three loads of wood loaded and 10 inflated tires! High floatation tires and walking beams on trailers make early season wood harvest and traveling over muskeg less precarious.
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One stump of the harvested tree is shown with an axe in front for size perspective. This 150 year old spruce had been dead for a number of years and finally fell some time this summer.
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Gene Plihal
for Smoky River Express
I have to admit as I walk or otherwise travel through the bush on a daily basis, I keep my eye open for good firewood. I know, there’s lots of talk these days about keeping carbon emissions down and frankly I do the best I can in limiting the amount of wood I burn. But, as my good friend Mors Kochanski often says, “A fire warms you twice. Once when you cut it and once when you burn it.” I would go one step further and say that it warms you three times, while cutting, splitting and burning it.
Over the last five years I have been keeping an eye on a dead spruce near Frank Lake. Usually the location of the spruce prohibits access because of the wet trails, so I have passed it up as firewood until this year when I notice the wind had finally brought it down. So, I undertook to harvest this tree and what an undertaking it turned out to be.
First, I purchased a firewood license from SRD (Sustainable Resources) in Peace River. Actually, I bought two licenses which entitled me to 10 metres of wood. I was spared the task of felling the tree since, as I said, the wind had finally taken care of that. The de-branching was also largely done because the tree fell between a number of other trees and had its branches removed in the fall.
With my 20 inch Echo chain saw I made my first cut through the tree. When I had cut the first stump, I sat down in amazement and began counting the rings (indicating the age of the tree). I counted 150 rings indicating that it was a sapling about the time John A. was prime minister of Canada. The tree measured 81 cm in diameter (about 32 inches) and had a length from trunk to top of 30 metres (126 feet). And, of course, since the tree had been standing dead for a number of years, one would assume many of the top branches and crown of the tree had been lost which, no doubt, would have made the tree even taller.
It’s more than a little humbling to realize that I had just cut up a tree that was here before Canada was a country! I equated this experience a little to harvesting a moose in that there is a majesty in this animal as well that makes harvesting a bit of a shame.
What had this tree gone through in the 150 years it existed? Some of the rings of the tree were clearly very close together indicating drought years. And, I wondered, how many forest fires skirted this tree and how many lightning strikes took out adjacent trees but left this one intact? How many bears, elk, deer, moose, wolves and other animals and birds had rested under this tree during this span of time? And again parallelling this with the moose harvest, how many wolves does a moose evade in a year? How many death traps, including being born to a moose cow in the wilderness without any kind of veterinary assistance in the event of complications did this moose avoid? Nature is cruel and yet majestic in its own way.
For fear of romanticizing this job of wood cutting too much, let me tell you what the wood harvest cost me:
1. Two licenses – $10.50
2. Chain saw oil – $7.50
3. Chain saw fuel – $5.00
4. One flat tire – $20.00
5. Chain saw chain – $25.00
6. Truck fuel – $45.00
Another good friend of mine, Ron Meunier, used to ask me, “Have you ever considered how much time you spend cutting wood and what your time is worth?” Indeed, Ron, this is a very salient question. About 15 hours were spent cutting and hauling this wood. So even at Tim Horton wages, this is another $150.00.
So, I suspect all of my readers can add these figures up and come to a conclusion as to what this wood cost me. I suspect there’s four to five cords that came from this tree and I see by advertisements in local papers and magazines that wood is selling for about $150 per cord for split poplar. I am told by some relatives in the city that it goes much higher there.
At present prices of natural gas, it is probably much cheaper to heat with it. But, anyone sitting around a campfire knows that there’s something magical about that which can’t be replaced by a Coleman stove. So it is with a fireplace in a home or a wood stove in a cabin. The crackle of dry spruce lights up even the heaviest heart.
And so, as J.P. Thibault and Richard Boucher (Lucienne’s brother and son) split this wood out a Lucienne’s lot at Shaw’s Point, (they are always looking for a challenge in stumps that I bring out to see if I can find wood they can’t split), I know there will be a number of younger bystanders (J.P.’s, Richard’s, Michelle’s and Lizanne’s children among them) looking at and counting the rings in these stumps in fascination. Maybe if all of us took the time to acquaint all of our young ones of the grandeur of nature and how it warms us, feeds us and shelters us, trees of this stature will be allowed to prosper in the future. For in harvesting wood or wildlife, there is not only a benefit to mankind but also a responsibility that we have to nature. Our kids and grandkids, as well as we adult, would all do well to know what this responsibility is. The next two decades may well indicate the fate of this planet, and to a very large extent, I suspect, its fate is in human hands
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