Graeme McMahon Regnans Take Down

It's gonna be like auto-Clone and brain transplant or something like that soon.
All I need is a totally new 25, or even 35 year old body, with a full download of my 67 year old brain in it...less the slight short term memory challenges :/:.

I would be even more awesome than I am now! :lol:

And if we could do the same with Jerry Beranek...goodness, what a gift that would be to the rest of us, as he pushed the envelope of educating us poor pleb tree climbers beyond what he already has.
 
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I thought this post deserved another bump! Amazing pictures, Gerry. Amazing operation, Graeme. It’s great to see this sort of stuff being documented. I thought some might be interested in a Tahune update.
Tasmania had quite a bad bushfire season 2018-2019, around 200,000 hectares burnt. One area burnt quite badly was the forest around the Tahune airwalk where one of the Sherbrooke Tree Services famous videos was filmed.
Arborists and other contractors worked for over a year to make it safe to open again.

I hadn’t been there since I was a child so thought we would go for a look, came around one corner on the airwalk and this spar looked familiar.
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For scale the airwalk is roughly 30m in this section, I think the mature eucs around the airwalk average 60-70m.
 
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It is kind of interesting seeing the logs of that job laying on the ground, the remnants and aftermath years later of arguably the top tree vid of all time. :rockhard:

I can still hear that spacy music soundtrack in my mind
 
Thanks for the bump! I haven't been down to Tahune since the fires, must do again.
I remember my first visit, it was just before you all removed that tree, then the next time it was gone. They made that spar into a 'wishing spar'. Chuck coins onto it, then the money went towards raptor rehab.
At 30m up on the airwalk, looking up higher into the trees and seeing pruning cuts....holeeee that's high!
 
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That's Chemical Brothers for the soundtrack.



That's a long, long time standing in spurs with a big saw, flinging chunks sideways.
 
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On a tall trunk so rotten that it crumbles apart when it is bucked. One of the vids I saw when I began to seriously look at tree working. So impressive. And after these years of making it a living, it still scares me.
 
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It's amazing just how little sound wood, I mean just a thin shell sometimes, can hold an otherwise sound looking tree standing, standing on a thin, fractured shell, or core.

Dead trees standing on a shells are worse yet. But with those, if you're a savvy sawyer, you'll know what you're stepping into, and figure a work-around to make it safe.

But stepping into either scenario without any forethought on the matter can turn into a fallers worse nightmare.

The moment you throttle up and set the dogs into the bark, and chips start flying, the bar suddenly gets bound in the tree. Stuck!! WTF?

Yeah, WTF? you just cut the last sliver of support wood left holding the tree standing.

The very next second you glance out the corner of your eye and the tree is collapsing over you.

No time to think. Run for your life!

There's a couple of youtube vids showing that exact scenario.

I get the heebie jeebies just thinking about it sometimes. PTSD fo sho.
 

Graeme McMahon visited Seattle in 2002 for the ISA conference. We invited him to climb the 10' Bogachiel Spruce, in the Olympic Rainforest, as a benefit for the TREE Fund scholarship charity. CBS TV sent a film crew, and a 9 minute story appeared on 60 Minutes. There are short snippets showing Graeme on the TV show.
 

Graeme McMahon visited Seattle in 2002 for the ISA conference. We invited him to climb the 10' Bogachiel Spruce, in the Olympic Rainforest, as a benefit for the TREE Fund scholarship charity. CBS TV sent a film crew, and a 9 minute story appeared on 60 Minutes. There are short snippets showing Graeme on the TV show.

From the wayback machine, for sure.
 
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