The forest is constantly producing trees faster than we can cut them down. Even if we were not too busy with our many other tasks, we are not equipped to safely remove all of the large trees that become hazardous as they mature. Therefore, a crew who is so equipped is sometimes hired, and was here just this last week to remove several locusts, a few bays and a live oak.
1. The 80s are over. Someone painted this water pipe like this so that a crew cutting trees down nearby would not drop anything on it. The crew would have just put an orange cone over it.
2. I was much younger and healthier back in the summer of 1988, when I did an internship with some of the most excellent arborists in the Santa Clara Valley, but I never climbed like this.
3. These trees are not much more than eighty feet tall, but needed to be parted out over those roofs. They are less than forty years old, from the 1980s or so. The arborist is in the middle.
4. Locust is unpopular firewood. These locust trees were therefore cut into logs less than seven feet (or 84 inches) long to fit into a pickup for removal, but were then instead chipped on site.
5. This structurally deficient oak will eventually need to be removed. For now, it is groomed and lightened for winter storms. It was a nice day at the time, with temperatures in the low 80s.
6. Mature bay trees develop distended lignotubers. The trunk of this bay tree was significantly narrower just two feet above this stump. The tree was not much more than eighty years old.
This is the link for Six on Saturday, for anyone else who would like to participate:
https://thepropagatorblog.wordpress.com/2017/09/18/six-on-saturday-a-participant-guide/
Tony Tomeo 
Bay would be Umbellularia? Not the bay laurel that we call bay. Must have been a fairly meaty chipper to eat that lot, locust is hard wood as I recall, or is that only when it’s been dead a while.
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Yes, bay is Umbellularia californica, which is quite different from Laurus nobilis. The chipper is very powerful. Not only is locust very hard, but so is bay and madrone. It is such a waste that it was chipped though. Oak and madrone are preferred for firewood, so other less desirable wood gets disposed of. No one wants locust firewood because it smells objectionable. I never had a problem with it.
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Are distended lignotubers those lines in the trunk? What causes them?
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The lines are from slicing the lignotuber into manageable pieces after it was cut off where this remaining stump is now. (The stump was cut horizontally, and the lignotuber was then cut vertically.) Lignotubers are bulky basal burls of undifferentiated growth that regenerate after the original tree burns in a fire. Several trees that are endemic to fire reliant ecosystems produce them. Trees in riparian situations do not expect to burn completely, so do not produce lignotubers that are as big as those of the same species in drier and more combustible chaparral regions.
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