NO Wood!

Too bad there wasn't an easy way to send you some wood from our area.

We're surrounded by national forest. The NF has been thinning the forest for firebreaks around every little private inholding, and strategic points along the roads. There are HUGE piles (couple cords each) piled up all around our community of mixed scrub oak/ponderosa/manzanita/juniper. They're already bucked up into about 3 foot lengths and neatly piled, basically free for the taking. Lots of logs in the 4-6" size, perfect for firewood. We're talking thousands of cords of wood. I should take pictures -- it's pretty impressive what they're doing. The work crews are really hustling and clearing more acreage faster than I would have believed possible given the number of guys doing it.

(Officially, you're supposed to have a firewood permit. Price varies depending on the type of wood you want. Unofficially, the FS foreman said, wink-wink, just take what you want when he wasn't there. We have a permit, so it's a moot point. Pretty sure the rest of our neighbors collecting the bounty don't.)

Juniper is a fantastic firewood. Smells good, burns clean.

Ponderosa is pitchy and burns fast, but it's good for bonfires and outdoor fireplaces.

Scrub oak burns VERY hot, and for a long time. It's the wood you want when you're banking a fire in a stove for the night.

Manzanita is a tremendously hot, hard, fast-burning wood that is good for smoking meat (once suitably soaked) and cooking over, and if you need a really hot fire in a stove. It's a bit difficult to find decent sized pieces (it's really a bush that occasionally gets several feet tall) but you don't have to split it to burn it.

Firewood won't be a problem for us this year, or for a few years to come, LOL ...

After any bad storm here. the fire department is out cutting trees blocking the road. With a scanner you can usually find out where it is and how big the tree is. If someone clears it fast, it usually isn't worth much as fire wood. We don't haul the tree off. We simply cut enough to get the road cleared or down to the point we can get a chain around it and drag it to the side.

After the storms we've had this year, our craigslist is loaded with ads for free firewood. Most of it is cut and stacked, ready for picking up and hauling away. Although it might not be good for burning this year it would definitely be good to have on hand for next year. My son has been able to get 11 pickup loads so far this year, all cut and ready for him to pick up.

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“Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.”
― Erma Bombeck

Drove by the Arthur, Il sawmill last week. It still had piles of wood. $30 a load.

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