Bald Cypress - Swamp Collecting Video - "Torque"

Here's the first video of the tree I've named "Torque".  The second will be out some time this year.

I passed on collecting the tree in the previous year but it called to me to come and collect it.  I returned the following year with a friend to collect the tree.  The tree has a pronounced twist which I accentuated in it's first styling.

We had a great deal of fun collecting the tree.  Not seen in the video is that the tree was so large it took us nearly 2 hours to get it out by hand.  This was a real beast.



Be sure to read the disclaimer at the end of the video. I had too much fun writing it.

Another excellent video Bill

And yes, if I ever find myself in your swamp I will definitely look out for the rabid racoons!!!!!

Cheers

Richard

not that it matters, but i'm not sure how i feel about this one

it was funny though, how when you were first walking in, you told mitch which tree he is going to want, which looked okay...
but then you got to the tree you collected and it was like night and day

and then you went back to mitch's tree and...

If you haven't heard this before, you're hearing it from me: If you go collecting in the swamp with your friend, you're coming out with a story.

Especially if you don't come out with your friend.

The tree that Mitch got was a very nice little tree. I'm sorry I don't have any same-day photos of the tree, but I fell and the camera went into the water. The first thing you do in this case is pop out the battery and then begin drying. We had tagged at least two trees for Mitch. The location had several twisted trees. I'm used to finding more vertical looking bark, but here we were finding twist after twist.

Mitch is a great guy. He's also a bit of a comedian.

He hurt his knee when he fell (seen in the video). He laughingly claims I was a maniac and was trying to kill him. Maybe he'll see this post and chime in. He looked very pale when we were down to the last 50-60 yards trying to get the tree out. This was after much more than an hour of dragging, flipping, carrying the tree out. It was a big heavy beast. So we submerged the tree and went for lunch intending to come back for the tree the following week. He left for home, but I went back. Lunch and a bag of M&Ms gave me the energy to go back and fetch the tree on my own.

I like to think that if Mitch died out there, I'd have called 911 and done my best to drag him to the edge of the swamp. But in reality, I'd have first secured the tree in my truck, then gone back for Mitch.