As a retired faller who used to jack big trees on a regular basis, I would like to offer up a Bit of advice that may save you some trouble. When you have a heavy lean in the wrong direction such as the Cedar in the video, NEVER put your undercut in before you start your back cut. You can cut most of your final cut first, cut the notch for the jack next, being carful to make the notch just big enough to slip the jack in without losing precious lifting distance of the jack. The jack needs to be placed in such a way as to not push the root and collapse and fall out, as well. Next lift the tree with the jack. Then cut your undercut, lift the tree, cut, lift, cut and lift. Go slow with the cutting, and follow with the jack and wedges. Also, don’t try to swing the tree with a dutchman or any felling trick like that. Try to go 180 degrees opposite of the lean, and NEVER trust a Cedar to keep a hinge at the stump. Your undercut should be about 6 inches below the final cut to allow the hinge to flex a bit more with all of the tension you’re putting on the hinge. Again don’t trust Cedars. Good luck, be safe!

Hey Jake- Love your videos and how open you are with both learning and sharing. As a 20 year Seattle area tree service owner this one was particularly interesting to me-Truth is we don’t usually have such understanding/flexible homeowners around here to bail us out of any miscalculations by letting us fell additional trees. Since you sent a guy up this tree already, why not have him just continue limbing it up to avoid this? You even referenced a video you made where this happened to you before and correctly said it was the lack of momentum that was the issue here. It ended without injury or property damage but it was really sketchy for you to fell those other trees holding this one up. Thats why it’s so important to plan ahead but also have a contingency plan. Once into this one, to be safe and not remove other trees here, I would have used a spider lift and pole chainsaw to trim those branches holding it up. Me and many other guys around would have helped you out with just a quick call. You got a lot of “great job” comments on here and I’m not being mean or a know it all, j