A little wood harvesting

The last bass I made had a couple of pieces of spalted maple in it from a tree that fell in a forest where I ride mountain bikes. I have been thinking ("thinking" understates how much this has been on my mind) about going back there with a chainsaw and getting more of the tree. Its just sitting there rotting on the ground.

Today I took a hike out there. I put the chainsaw in my multi-day pack and headed out. It was probably a little over a mile from the closest parking spot to the tree. All downhill on the way there, all uphill on the way back.

The log is huge and my chainsaw is not, so I had to figure out how to tackle it. I spent probably an hour cutting, it wasn't easy. Spalting is basically the beginning part of a tree rotting, so there's a fine balance between cool spalting and punky worthless wood - this tree is on its way to punky worthless wood. I'm not sure the stuff I got was worth the effort, but I'll know more after it thaws and dries.

The scene of the harvest - I left my water bottle there for scale - there's some nice spalting in there:

The chainsaw by itself on the way down was heavy, but completely manageable. The chainsaw plus three pieces of wood was unbelievably heavy. It reminded me of the first time Dawn and I went hiking in Hawaii and we brought EVERYTHING in the packs, it was miserable until we made the decision to ditch all unnecessary stuff, except this time I couldn't ditch anything. I made my way back to the car one step at a time and it ended up really not being that bad - my legs got quite a workout. I wrapped my chainsaw in a towel (that's what you see poking over my shoulder).

Here's what I brought out. I'll see how this dries before I make any plans to get more each of these pieces are about 3" thick: 

I'm glad I scratched that itch, hopefully I can stop thinking about it now.