Building yourself a cabin out in the woods is not easy, in fact, it is a complicated process that takes a lot of patience, hard work, and, most of all, training to finish. That is one of the reasons why I joined Chilcotin Holidays in Gold Bridge, BC, Canada for both their Horse Logging and Log Cabin Building School, which I both successfully completed by achieving the certificate for both trainings. The pineforests and plateaus around Carpenter Lake and Gun Creek are the ideal playground for the orientation.Falling trees is essential to both of those professions. Being able to fall trees correct and safely is important to guarantee that neither the product nor the faller is not damaged. In order to be able to fall effective and safe training is again most important. On both courses, the instructors showed us very carefully the procedure of how to cut the logs at the right spots, how to determine angle of the tree, angle of falling and how to direct the tree. I learned that the most important thing is to cut out 1/3 into the tree(they call this doing an undercut) and to do a backcut about 5 inches higher than the edge cut out before. To give us an example, we were cutting dead wood on the property, where our safety was guaranteed, and under the strict supervision of our instructors, everybody had the chance to practice their skills with the chainsaw.
Chainsaw safety and maintenance is another key element to understand and implement. The powerful tool needs a special gas and a lot of care for the motor and chain (pay attention to rocks and do not cut into the ground). A special filing technique is required to keep it sharp and in the right shape.
At the end of the day, both groups had a big enough pile of wood fallen and limbed to be able to start the log cabin building the day after. A lot of excitement for the first day of a course and we were well prepared and excited for the rest of the course.