Moving a Big Stump

We have been digging steadily for the past two weeks and have reached the location of the tree we removed on Mar 12.  It was a big tree and it had a big stump.  We don't have a general solution for dealing with stumps.  Small ones we can burn.  Medium sized ones we often bury if we can get them to a suitable location.  Really big ones are something of a problem - mainly because they are very heavy and hard to move.  The stump we extracted today probably weighs in at a couple of tons.  We can't lift it - we can only push it around.  In any case we had to get it out of the build site.

The big stump right after we pulled it over with the excavator.

There is a large amount of dirt and rock stuck to the root mass.
The wood is heavy but the rock and dirt is even heavier.

We cut the trunk off as close to the bottom as we could.
We used the excavator to knock some of the dirt and rock from the bottom to try and lighten it up.
That helped a little but the thing was still pretty heavy.  

The excavator can't pick it up but it can push it down the hill out of the build site.

We got it to the bottom of the hill.  We wanted to push it up the next hill to a location where we could bury it but it could not be done - too much friction, too much gravity.  We left it where it is - in a future blog entry I will tell you how we finally moved it - assuming we figure that out.