The End Of A Magnificent Tree

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A few days ago I read a very interesting and enjoyable post by @Platespinner. I throughly enjoyed her post about her husband chopping down a tree and it reminded me of when we first bought our house 15 years ago. My house was built in 1900, has 20 windows ( which was a huge selling point for me ), is a 2 story house with basement and a gravel driveway. The gravel driveway is a big part of this story. In the middle of the driveway very close to the barn and about 20 feet away from our house stood a giant maple tree. This tree stood higher than my house I would say about 30 feet, and was just over 5 feet in circumference. The lean of the tree was directed towards the house. But the tree was mostly alive so we lived with driving around the tree to get our boat inside the barn. But it was a chore to do. After several years I'm sad to say the tree started to die. It had to come down. So we rented a cherry picker and up my husband went to cut down the upper most parts of the tree. It was a sight to behold, needless to say this was not something my husband could do alone and my brother and nephew were there to help. When my husband got the upper most part cut it came down with a huge crash and the smaller limbs and branches hit the ground and bounced up at least 5 feet before settling on the ground. I wish I had my video camera at the time, the bounce up was amazing. We have an enclosed back porch with windows and one of the branches hit the window and broke it. That was the only damage to either barn or house that we sustained in the whole adventure. And the end of this huge undertaking we broke completely 2 chain saws, and several heavy wedges, ( that by the way I thought impossible ), before the tree was completely down. At one point all that was left was the last 4 feet of the trunk. I had to see how big, so I climbed up on the slab, laid down on it and it was longer than I am tall. Amazing. We counted the rings at this point and it looked like just over 100 rings. And the wood we got from this tree heated my nephews house all winter, and the wood we kept took us 5 years to burn in our wood burning stove in the barn. The entire take down of the tree took us over a year as we couldn't at the time afford to keep buying chainsaws. This was about 13 years ago and we are still working on getting the stump completely out of the driveway. We chop at it every now and then and pour stump out stuff on it occasionally. We still have the stump there but it's at ground level and small. So eventually we will be rid of it entirely. I will always remember that magnificent tree but it was dying, leaning toward my house and would have come down on top of my sons room. it had to go. This spring my husband has another dead tree to take down, and we also have an even bigger black walnut tree that looks to be dying we are not quite sure of that one yet, but I think it will have to come down as well sometime in the future. That one is going to be more difficult and possibly we will have to hire a tree cutting company to take that one down, I would say that one is at least 50 feet tall. I hate taking down the trees but if they are dying they have to go.