A dangerous tree

I took a week's vacation recently, and it wasn't much of a restful vacation.  More like catching up on chores - one big chore in particular.  Ever since moving here, I have been worried about one very large Ponderosa pine tree that was leaning toward the house.  I did not want to attempt to take the tree down myself because it was leaning the wrong direction, and I wasn't sure I could make it fall where I wanted it to.

Notice how the branches on this big leaning tree are the same size as some of the surrounding trees...

It took the tree service several weeks to give me a bid, then another month for them to actually come out and drop that tree (and a couple of others, one of which was leaning toward our power line).

As luck would have it, I had scheduled some time off about the time they got around to felling the big tree.  Good thing too; it was a pretty big job to clean it up.  The tree service would have hauled the tree off, but it would have cost 3x as much.  So I decided to do it myself.  ugh...  Of course it had to be the biggest, fullest tree on the property!

Happily, the tree fell away from the house, but it also blocked one of the driveway access roads.

Here I'm getting ready to start cutting off the limbs.

The first of four burn piles.  The tree is still blocking the driveway, but the lower half has been limbed.  I decided to save logs from the larger limbs.  Somebody will want them for firewood.

The driveway is open again!  Note the addition of more logs from the tree branches to the left.  There are still plenty of limbs remaining on the far side of the trunk.

The final burn pile.  The trunk is mostly sectioned.  There are quite a few more branch logs on the left.  After taking this photo, I stacked out the branch logs behind the house, but probably won't move the sections of the trunk until they dry out.  They are really heavy.

We had so much rain and a little snow, that I had to buy a weed burner to ignite the last pile.  I wasted a few gallons of gasoline and diesel, with no lasting fire to show for it.  This little sucker got it going after about 3 minutes of roaring and howling flame.  It's noisy, but it works.