Stump 7 for the year

I finally finished removing stump number 7 for the year.  Once again another massive tree stump.  I wouldn't say this was the largest tree stump I removed, but this stump and stump 5 must be in the top five largest tree stumps I have removed over the years.

Another stump I chopped as I had to chop and remove side roots of the stump so I could dig around the rest of the stump sections and roots.  This stump had different roots join together.  Not a common thing I have found over the years.  Don't think this was a Western Larch / Tamarack tree.  Some roots were hard, others were not as hard.  I did have one root with sap in it.  This time when I chopped a root, sap ran out of the root like water.

The start.  How big can this stump be?

Still doesn't seem too bad of a stump.

Hmm... the stump has gotten larger.  And a side root grew just below ground level instead of angling downward like they usually do.  This far out I quit digging around the root and chopped it off.

Oh wait.  Another side root growing just below ground level.  And farther out.  The previous side root was at the edge of the hole.

The second side root I removed.  Again I got tired of digging to find the end.  And again the root didn't go downward as it left the stump.  And a pretty big root just below ground level.

I am getting tired of digging around and chopping tree stumps. I spent two to three hours a day for quite a number of days.  The closest part of the stump couldn't be easily chopped and I didn't want to dig around it anymore.

I should be able to easily pull this part of the stump from the ground using the tractor.  Nope.  I tried pulling it up and the back of the tractor started to come up off the ground.  So I went around to the other side of the hole.  Maybe it would be easier to pull the stump root out of the ground.  Not really.  But since the rear of the tractor wasn't coming off the ground I was able to try driving away over and over and finally the root came out of the ground.   A short part of the chain has smaller links and they didn't break, but they kind of elongated.  This made these links stick together.   So I used another chain I had for the rest of the stump.  The next day I used a hammer to break loose the links that were sticking together.  The last link was so elongated as to make the link too flat.  I had to hacksaw and cut this link off the chain.

This part of the stump had been connected to the rest of the stump.  Before I got the tractor I chopped and removed another side root or two and also the top of the stump. That is why I initially thought I could also remove this end section by hand.  You can also see how hard the wood was at the top of the stump.

Go back to the earlier photo of the overall stump.  I pushed that stump with the tractor's bucket.  Nope.  Didn't break off.  The stump leaned but still was too difficult to pull out of the ground.  I used an axe, and since the stump wasn't too thick along the top, I split the stump into three pieces.  While the stump top wasn't too thick, the wood was still hard and took some effort to split.  I also saw a couple of side roots going into the dirt and had to chop and cut those to make less of the stump to pull out of the dirt.

The following two photos are of the larger two parts of the stump I was able to pull out.

All removed now.  I didn't measure the hole.  The previous large stump was 12-13 ft long and 9 feet wide.  This stump was at least 13 ft long.  The width was less.  Maybe 5 to 6 ft wide.   It was a long tree stump but not a wide or round stump.

I used the tractor to push the dirt back into the hole as I didn't want to spend an afternoon to push the dirt in using a shovel.  So some of the grassy sections went underground and not completely on top.

In the background are the stumps - there are two right next to one another - that I plan to burn in a bonfire later.  I'm tired of removing stumps for now, so the stump on the left side in the grass I will leave till next year.  Earlier I had planned on removing that stump this year.

In the background center you can see the dirt where stump 5 used to be.