Spring Fire Season in Virginia

It started with Hurricane Gaston. That storm damaged so many trees on our 11 acre property it was impossible for one person to completely fix. Just cutting downed trees around the house and keeping the driveway open was hard work. Then, at least once every year, wind or ice storms added to the damage. Some areas of our property have become almost completely inaccessible and downright dangerous, with trees leaning in all directions.



The problem trees are mostly Virginia Pines. These eastern pines grow tall and straight, but have very little root structure to hold them up. After talking with the local forestry service, we paid for a professional "timber cruise". This gave us a very useful report on types of trees, and recommendations on how to manage the forest. As it turns out our property has an interesting variety of cedar, gum, maple, oaks, and of course pines. There are also some great old sycamore trees along the creek bottom where I built our mini version of a Pennsylvania Dutch covered bridge.

The bridge provided easy across to a couple acres of our land on the other side of the creek. My favorite recommendation out of the timber report was to simply let "nature take it's course". Eventually the hardwoods will take over as the pines die off. I like that, mostly because it's by far the easiest thing to do. However, it isn't fast, and it does nothing to solve the problems associated with trees falling on the house and across the driveway.

Several years ago we were quoted $800 per day to cut dead and leaning trees, with no clear estimate of how many days it would take to clean things up. They would work for as many days as I was willing to pay them. Cutting dead and leaning trees is certainly very dangerous work and no doubt worth every nickle of that daily rate, but I couldn't afford it. So I kept nibbling around the edges keeping trees off the house and keeping the driveway open.

Then a recent fire burned over 1300 acres less than 15 miles from our property. You can see smoke from that fire in the trees in this photo.

That lit a fire under me to do more. You can see the result of my new effort in the last photo. My intent was to start cutting fire breaks and separate the "fuel". That way, if a fire did get going in our woods, it might be confined to a small area, or at least be easier to access and control.

Working with chainsaw and axe I cleared just enough of a path to get my 1946 Ford 2N into the woods with a bush hog on it. The tractor is about 5 feet wide. As you can see, it worked well and now that I am into the woods, I am quickly learning how to do custom bush hog work. This small Ford tractor is ideal for this kind of work. A bigger machine simply couldn't get into the areas I can go with the little Ford tractor.

More photos :

I've been at it for a couple of weekends now. The tractors and my body have accumulated a few new bumps and bruises along the way. This is FUN, but it's also hard work. Running down saplings occasionally has one going the wrong way and abusing a headlight. A low limb caught the exhaust on my 52 and bent it back. The cutter tends to throw an incredible amount of debris in just about any direction. Some of the missiles whizzing by could be dangerous. One stick cracked me in the back of the head. It sounded like Babe Ruth just hit a home run and knocked me a little sillier than usual. It's only a matter of time before one of the sharp pointy missiles punctures a tire or a lung. I'm going to get some used conveyor belt and make a guard for the front of my cutter.