Let’s start with this picture. There’s a lot going on:
A pleasing parabola is in the foreground. I was limbing trees (more on that in a moment). Stacking limbs face down with their branches aligned this means they create a beautiful, consistent dome. I want to run my hand over it to feel how whole and smooth it is, which if course it isn’t because it is made of pine needles, sap, and sticks.
Only live limbs make this shape– in the background, behind the dog with the red collar (Kookum), you can see a stack of limbs from the same species of tree, a foot away from the first tree, that are dead. They make an ugly stack. But an easier to burn stack as well.
In the middle, there is ball drama. Grandmother (laying down, chill, non-nonchalant) has got the ball, and he is not sharing it with Kookum (sitting, staring, earnest). They were locked in this tableau for ~45 minutes.
Another thing you can see in the photo is the trunk of the tree closest–it has knobby bits where I’ve cut the limbs off. Why not cut them in close to the trunk and beautiful? Because that tree is alive and will stay standing, and as those branch bits die, bugs will move in and we don’t want the bugs to get into the living truck of the tree. So they get a buffer while the tree sorts itself out. If I was going to cut down that tree for firewood (ie, if it was already dead), then I’d cut snug against the trunk because trying to fit wood into the stove opening when there are bits sticking out is extremely, acutely frustrating. I learned that lesson my first year.
Why am I limbing these nice trees? Two reasons: first, I am making a path to get to some deadwood so I can buck them for fire wood. Second, I’m doing a much more systematic job than a path strictly requires because I’m fire-smarting, which involves removing the bottom limbs of all trees up to six feet or a quarter of the tree, whichever is less.
Fires burn from the bottom up. They burn up hills, and up trees. The more “up” there is, the hotter the fire burns and the harder it is to stop. So by removing fuel from the bottom of the tree and keeping wildfires eating at the top of trees, the fire is slower, cooler, and less likely to rip through and burn my house down.
