Coastal Removals – Feb 19-20, 2024 – Whispering Boughs Tree Service

This week, Allan and Jeremy found themselves on BC’s Sunshine Coast, removing two significantly large trees! While we don’t usually operate so far from home, it was incidental to another trip and how nice is it to get to stay at a remote cabin for a couple of days!

First, A Fir

The first tree was a Douglas fir tree, stately in its place looking out over the inlet but causing concern as it was dead and brittle.

From below on the dock, the Douglas fir cut quite an imposing figure

Jeremy climbed up the tree, taking off limbs as he went in a standard removal. The tree was about 80 feet tall and 30 inches in diameter, and the top came down with quite a crunch, breaking apart into pieces (see the video below). After the limbs and top were removed, Jeremy took another 8-foot piece of the top of the stem, then climbed back down so Allan could fall the tree back into the forest.

Falling the tree proved challenging—after all, a 30 inch Doug fir is not going down without a fight! Sap drained out of the stem as Allan made his face cut. Jeremy had tied a lead rope to the top of the stem before climbing down which was tied off further up the hill in the forest with Jeremy and the homeowner—a retired arborist himself—ready to pull. Using falling wedges in the backside of the trunk, Allan artfully whittled his way through the stem, finally taking out enough that the whole stem fell, as if in slow motion, precisely into a gap between the surrounding trees. Although it was felled right over the pathway to the outhouse, even the stone stairs were not damaged and a little fir tree that got slightly squished sprung back to life after the trunk was removed.

Allan carefully added wedges to direct the trunk’s fall, while Dave and Jeremy held tension on the rope

Once it was on the ground, the tree looked even bigger than it had before it was felled. Allan and Jeremy spent some time bucking the trunk into splittable lengths. Douglas fir makes for good firewood, and at a boat-access cabin without electricity they weren’t about to let it go to waste!

Cedar in the Porch

Next, they tackled the other tree. At the time the cabin was built, the porch had been constructed around a cedar tree that was quite a bit smaller then than it is now. Over the years, it had grown into the porch and started to push on the floor joists, knocking the whole cabin a little out of whack.

From below, it’s easy to see the pressure that the tree was putting on the cabin’s structure

This tree, of course, couldn’t just be felled in one big piece. Instead, the branches were lowered onto the deck and hauled into a pile by Allan while Jeremy scaled the tree, clearing as he went. The cedar had multiple small tops after having been lopped off several years prior, so these were also lowered without too much difficulty to the deck.

After the top was gone, the strategy had to change—the rounds from the stem were much too large to drop onto the deck without causing damage. Fortunately, in front of the cabin was a small beach; the only thing to avoid was a small set of wooden steps descending to the rocks below. Skilfully, Jeremy directed each round to fall on the rocky beach, missing the stairs entirely. They continued removing the rounds until the top of the trunk was below the floor joists, then left the rest of it. Another successful removal!