We recently had the opportunity to salvage the largest straight Claro Black Walnut tree in the world. The trunk was 48′ long, 11′ wide at the butt and crotch and 78″ across at 5′ off of the ground. It was planted by an Oregon trail homesteader in the mid 1800’s. The current owners purchased the property 29 years ago and have loved this majestic tree living on their property. It wasn’t until a few years ago that it was unfortunately infected with thousand cankers disease and started showing signs of decline with dead branches. The owners would pay arborists to come and trim out the dead branches. This year the tree showed serious signs of decline by having a completely dead top. The owners have 2 kids and host weddings in the summer on their beautiful property and they did not want to risk a dead branch falling and seriously injuring someone so they decided it was time for the tree to come out. We have known them for about 4 years so they called us along with a few other companies to come and look it and they decided to let us salvage it. You can see a video of us salvaging it here.
When it came time to fall the tree and we started cutting the pie we noticed that we were cutting through a lot of rot. That was due to a huge rotten hole up the center of the tree, the tree was being held by about one foot of solid wood around the trunk. If we did not come in and salvage it when we did, a huge wind storm could have came and did some serious damage.
Due to the rotten hole and the logistics of the yard/driveway we ended up with (1)
20′ long section, (1) 18′ section and a 10′ section that we cut into book matches. We ended up salvaging 108,000lbs of wood that will be milled into slabs and lumber.