Sept 30, 2008 - Hiking and Firewood

When we went to pick up the yurt in Montrose in early September, we went for a hike from the town of Ouray. They call it the Switzerland of America. The scenery there is amazing. The building in the picture is an old miner's bunkhouse, perched on the side of cliff, thousands of feet above the valley floor.

The forest service sells firewood permits for $10. per cord. When they are thinning beetle killed pine, or cutting firewood killed wood, they limb the trees, and usually cut them to a length short enough to allow the public to drag them out to the roads. We collected four cords, and used one to help some neighbors out that couldn't get their own. Here's Jeanne, who does all the work in this family, sawing away on one piece to get it down to stove length for splitting. She said that a log this size takes between 200 and 300 strokes to cut. I don't think I count strokes when I cut, but she's probably right.

We have two big, antique cross cut saws that we bought at antique stores in Maine for around $20 each. This one is used for sawing logs to length and can be handled by either one or two people (there's a small post handle at the opposite end from Jeanne). Our other saw is a long, flexible one that we use for felling trees and requires two people to operate. I've found that these old saws can be sharpened pretty easily with a fine triangular file and a flat file. It takes me two or three hours to sharpen each saw, but it doesn't seem to need to be done very often. It's great exercise sawing wood to length, especially for the upper body. We both enjoy doing it. I don't think we'd enjoy cutting wood so much if we were using a chainsaw.