The Adventures of Jen: Chainsaw Training

And the fun begins! I am proud to say that I have now successfully operated a chainsaw without chopping off any of my, or any bystander's, limbs. Infact, I can actually take a chainsaw apart and put it back together in working condition! I can name over 20 parts on the beast as well. :) Myself, my teamleader Coli, and my teammate Lindsay, are the only ones allowed on our team to operate our chainsaw, since we were the only three trained. I'm kinda pumped.

Day one of training was incredibly painstaking. Especially being the morning after Halloween, a much celebrated holiday for Americorps members. It was a full ten hour day of sitting in a classroom. It felt like an episode of the Twilight Zone at times, as the instructor ran on and on about "the bad monkey cage"...still not sure what that was all about. Oh yeah...I just remembered that I already wrote about this. Oh well.

I think this is called the "pie cut."
The tree will fall towards us.

Day two of the training was out in the field! I was sooo nervous. Especially after hearing all of the horror stories and viewing greusome pictures of mistakes that were made after 27 years of experience. After waiting over an hour at a gas station for our host to meet us (he was late due to traffic...maybe construction?) we crawled up a mountain. We were on a single lane road and met a local mountain character at one of the bends. He proceeded to flail his hands wildly and yell obscenities about staying on "our side of the road" yada yada yada. That was a little tense. It took about an hour and half of actual driving time to get there.

The morning consisted of taking chainsaws apart and then putting it back together again. The afternoon consisted of each of us taking turns to saw small clumps of brush down. We learned some technique and just got comfortable holding the dangerous thing. It wasn't has heavy as I expected. To end the day, we watched the main trainer fell a tree. I hoped that the next day would bring some felling (cutting a tree down) or at least some bucking (chopping up an already downed log).

 

We used the smallest on in the back of the photo.

Brain, the main chainsaw instructor.

Unfortunately, this was not the case. Day three consisted of sitting around. I held the chainsaw once but only for pictures sake. The picture a total fraud, fyi. (I didn't take any actual action pics the first day because I forgot my camera.) The entire morning we talked about and watched the technique of the main trainer felling a tree again. Then we split into groups (40 people split up into 3 groups) with 2 1/2 working chainsaws.

Yep. 2 1/2 working chainsaws. Our group got the 1/2. What this means is that it would start and stop quite frequently. First, the faceplate fell off. Then the chain and bar. We actually got a video of this. Then we wondered if it ran out of gas...nope. It was the spark plug that kept falling off. We tried to fix it and then lost the bar nut somewhere in the wilderness. The duct tape from the back of my boots was utilized without success at one point. Right. The design or our particular chainsaw was meant for cutting limbs high up in a tree (landscaping), not working on the forest floor, so we blame that...at least partially.

The chainsaw stopped working.

The chainsaw started working.

Now we're trying to fix the chainsaw...
It had stopped working again, go figure.

The best part of the third day was actually the ride there. We took a more efficient route there as to avoid the cheerful mountain men with their roadrage and stopped at a different gas station/grocery store to wait for our host. Once again, we had over an hour of downtime. This time because of rush hour traffic? Eitherway, I actually have no complaints, because in my opinion, this was the most beautfiul part of California I have seen yet. I'm not entirely sure where we were, but the pictures speak for themselves. If only they could capture what it actually looked like!