East City Park Elm

Sadly, many American Elm trees around Moscow are infected with Dutch Elm disease.

We arranged with Roger Blanchard, The Moscow city arborist, to take all of the usable wood from a century-old American Elm tree. This tree was first girdled, and then felled, because it was found to be infected with Dutch Elm disease. The tree was felled by Lacey K tree service. We agreed to move the wood outside of Moscow and/or to remove all of the bark to kill the beetle larvae which carries Dutch Elm disease.



The butt end of the tree was massive, and we estimated its weight at close to 8,000 lbs. Far too large for my trailer, we borrowed the 5,000-lbs capacity trailer from PCEI. We hired a hydraulic self-loading rock-moving truck to lift the log onto the trailer. The weight of the log was enough to lift the back of the trailer and the back of my Jeep completely off the ground as it was being loaded.

The log and the weight were clearly too much to safely transport to my sawmill. Instead, we moved the log to the nearby PCEI campus. It took three 4x4 trucks to pull the log off of the trailer and onto the ground:



The hope is to mill and chainsaw carve this giant log into the special curved timber on the front of the PCEI Artist's studio...