Tell me something stupid you did!

In my first year, on a crew of three. Felling pines all day. Piling wood with tractor and chipping brush into piles in a field. Last tree of the day had the path of the tractor intersecting with the path of the chips. Foreman on the tractor, me and other grounding chipping away and forgot to look up before feeding. Look up a minute later and see him pinned down in the tractor seat, getting lit the fuck up by that twelve inch Vermeer. Swearing a blue streak. Cursing our mothers.

Same day the other idiot fed a pine log into the hopper while straddling it and got the worst racking I have yet to witness. Lifted his feet from the ground. Followed by him rolling around dry heaving, and me rolling around laughing.
 
I was felling a bunch of beetle kill lodgepole around some power lines in Grand Lake, CO for a friend. I would tie a line at 15 feet or so and have him pull them over away from the lines as I felled them. Most of them were tall and thin to get a wedge in. Got to the end of a long day on the last one and was sure it was leaning away from the lines so I just felled it without setting a pull line. It leaned back on the saw and the brittle hinge broke and it fell backwards right into the lines. Luckily it didn't bring anything down and I just pushed it off the lines the opposite direction. Neighbor came by half an hour later and said there was a big power spike. We said we didn't notice and I had already cleaned up the evidence. That was about 10 years ago.
 
Back in my very, very VERY arly years of.my career my step parents owned a lakefront cottage in western Maryland. Earlier in the year we had a cutting weekend where we removed several trees that hung over the cottage. July Fourth weekend we all planned to spend the weekend there and he asked me to bring my chainsaw as he had a few small dead snags that needed cut. We arrived Friday evening just before dusk and after all the supplies for the weekend were unloaded I looked over what needed done. Nothing too bad, so I thought, why not knock them down now. First one was a dead snag about 6-8" dbh. What could go wrong. I didn't notice the stacked electric entrance to the cottage nor the little hooked branch at the top of the snag. The branch hooked the service, arcing and sparking danced from the cottage to the transformer til the fuse blew out. The thing was, we were the second cottage on a peninsula with only one primary distribution service and everyone was arriving for the weekend. No one could get their beer cold. Needless to say I was a very unpopular fellow.
 
I just got my high score today. Using the 25" bar on a 28" dbh cottonwood with a little back lean and a bit of side lean. My guy pulling on the line I set and all the wedges I could fit wouldn't get it to go. I tickled the hinge just a little more, but since my bar was too short I didn't realize I went all the way through the hinge. I am putting up a couple panels of fence and a new tin roof tomorrow at the neighbors
 
Tomcihsawdust awesome thread man.
My mother in law bought my son a little playground a few years ago, pretty nice. No one told me, she just bought it, had my.wife mark the spot where we want is, the had someone show up to assemble in right under a tree I want to remove, right in the felling path.
Took this opportunity to show off to my wife who had never seen me so a real removal involving more then just felling. One of my first srt removals. I tied a limb off, looked at my buddy on the ground, then ripped right thru an untied limb right next to the tied one. My wife was not impressed.
I've also settled for less then 5 wraps on a timber hitch and have had to dodge a portawrap from delivering a hay maker and have had a negative rigging set up fly right off a spar when the ripe caught the piece. Missed a target below by inches.
 
lumberjackson said:
I just got my high score today. Using the 25" bar on a 28" dbh cottonwood with a little back lean and a bit of side lean. My guy pulling on the line I set and all the wedges I could fit wouldn't get it to go. I tickled the hinge just a little more, but since my bar was too short I didn't realize I went all the way through the hinge. I am putting up a couple panels of fence and a new tin roof tomorrow at the neighbors
Click to expand...

LumberJackson, I did the same thing with a 30" dbh cottonwood spar and my 20" bar after I buried the 36 inch bar into the concrete patio earlier in the day. The thing that saved me was a dynamic pull line tensioned with a come-a-long. The tree spun on the stump, but then got pulled in the right direction. I have seen people join a felling cut correctly with a bar shorter than the diameter of the tree, but I don't seem to have the knack.
 
Something my buddy did. We were climbing two pines side by side 10' apart in a confined area. every thing was roped till it came time to chunk it from there. I'm busy readying my top removal and he's in the process of cutting his out. He yells ready and gets into the back cut. I look over and my eyes instantly follow his climbing line upwards. I start yelling "HOLD IT HOLD IT HOLD IT...YOU'RE STILL TIED IN!!! HOLD IT!!!" So he goes for a little ride as the ground guy keeps the rope from running. Un-clips his climbing line and reaches over to me and gives me a couple of pounds "Thanks man...thanks...holy crap." He was so busy making sure everything was set on the ground he forgot about himself. Don't be in such a hurry and double check things.
 
Not an arborist story, but involves tree climbing. Early on in my cat rescue hobby, got a call from a lady to rescue a cat. Got there, cat was 35 feet up skinny pine tree, no good limbs until cat. NP, I tell lady, I will use my spurs (only had used them about 3 times previously). Also had my nearly brand new tree motion harness. Started up tree, but my spurs kept slipping out and I would hang against tree. I notice my harness felt weird, like it was riding very high. I keep going up out of stubbornness, but soon start running out of energy. I also seem to be strangely out of breath, can't seem to breathe very well as my harness is riding high, constricting breathing. Gets worse each time my spurs kick out and I hang in harness. Finally, at 25 feet, I wrap my arm around a spindly limb, and decided I need to come down. I get my rope out, and my Figure-8 descender, but my oxygen-deprived brain can't make any sense of it. I start to panic a bit, yell at lady to call 911 (as if that would do any good, we were in the boonies). Her mouth is hanging open at my stupidity, but she makes the call. I am hanging there, getting dizzier by the second, when the limb breaks and I slide down the trunk about 10 feet, halt, then slide the rest of the way. Get a real good nasty scratch up my chest from a stub, ribs feel like they have been hit by a hammer. I hit the ground, lay on my back and gasp for breath. 911 person from phone is asking if I am OK. I look up, and the cat says "To Hell with This!", and starts coming down the tree, makes it to the ground, and takes off to the house. Lady looks at me like I am crazy. I apologize to lady and take off.

On drive back, I figure out what happened -- I had forgotten to belt my leg straps, so harness was coming up around chest, constricting breathing. I delete helmet cam video as it is too much a monument to stupidity. I tell my brother this story later, and we die laughing about it. Why I didn't just whip out a nylon loop runner (several on my harness) and form something for me to step in, I have no idea. My stupidity quotient was sky-high that day.

I have never used spikes since then, and learned how to do stem climbing with ropes, lanyards, loop runners (which I have had to do on 3-4 rescues since then and am now a semi-expert at it.).

The End.
 
macswan said:
In my first year, on a crew of three. Felling pines all day. Piling wood with tractor and chipping brush into piles in a field. Last tree of the day had the path of the tractor intersecting with the path of the chips. Foreman on the tractor, me and other grounding chipping away and forgot to look up before feeding. Look up a minute later and see him pinned down in the tractor seat, getting lit the fuck up by that twelve inch Vermeer. Swearing a blue streak. Cursing our mothers.

Same day the other idiot fed a pine log into the hopper while straddling it and got the worst racking I have yet to witness. Lifted his feet from the ground. Followed by him rolling around dry heaving, and me rolling around laughing.
Click to expand...

like is not strong enough for that last gem
 
Haven't been lucky enough to tell a good story about myself, but I do have a quick one. A fella I used to work for ( awesome guy and great climber) spent all this time setting up a pretty elaborate rigging system, tied off the limb, then cut behind his block sending everything to the ground with zero damage. Same tree, all excited to do a pretty massive swing to the opposite side of this lage Chinese Banyan, jumps into his swing but forgot to unclip his work positioning lanyard. He was fine, but his ego not so much. Definitely had a hard laugh about it.
 
I was just swinging 20 feet or so in a river birch from one lead to another after setting up my rigging grabbed the first branch I saw and quickly realized it was dead broke right off and sent me flying it probably only happened because the homeowner was watching.
 
End of day, 30' up a Laurel oak spar, nature calls... I scurried down, dropped harness and dove across the 2-acre lot to the woods next to the property line. Took care of things, covered lightly with leaves, got back up for two more cuts. Neighbor stops in and says he's got a tree he wants me to look at, walks over to the woodline. It was 200yds away and he stepped in it in those pimply Adidas sandals! The odds, ya know...
 
Ok, great thread! Thanks for starting it, @Toomuchsawdust! I have nowhere near the depth and breadth of experience all of you folks have, so my story is pretty wimpy. When I was first learning to climb SRT, I think I must have done some large amount of redirecting of my rope. It was getting really late, and dark out, though helped by some back yard lights. So I wanted to come down for the day, and took my foot ascender and knee ascender off of the rope, descending only on my hitch.

I did have a stopper knot near the end of my rope, which promptly jammed itself hard up into the bottom of my pulley, if I'm recalling the details correctly. I did not have much length below the stopper, and being new, I was stuck there for quite a while until I remembered about making a mechanical advantage setup, which allowed me to pull myself back up, and then recover enough length of rope to reach the ground.

After this incident, I always tie my stopper knot about ten feet from the end of the rope, so that I will always be able to easily put on a knee or foot ascender if I ever need to ascend again.

After this incident, my older brother described my approach to things as "Hanging out in a tree like a Christmas ornament."

Tim
 
colb said:
End of day, 30' up a Laurel oak spar, nature calls... I scurried down, dropped harness and dove across the 2-acre lot to the woods next to the property line. Took care of things, covered lightly with leaves, got back up for two more cuts. Neighbor stops in and says he's got a tree he wants me to look at, walks over to the woodline. It was 200yds away and he stepped in it in those pimply Adidas sandals! The odds, ya know...
Click to expand...
Lmfao. "Pack it up, the homeowner stepped in my shit. Ive seen everything. Time to go home."

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