It was windy at Elizabeth’s house last night, but she didn’t think too much of it because it wasn’t that windy….
Sometimes when we have high winds at my house, it is calm out at the ranch, and when I left my house that morning the winds had died down, so didn’t think there would be too many issues at the ranch. I was wrong.
We came out to the ranch this morning ready to work with the horses, but we were greeted with what appeared to be the aftermath of either a very big party, or what must have looked like Dorothy’s house after the tornado. Chairs were being blown about, and trash cans and muck buckets were strewn down the driveway. Trash had accumulated in Ruby and Brutus’ stall as well as across the ranch.
Two large branches came down in Brutus’ stall (he was OK!).
What was more disconcerting, however, was the fact that two very large branches had crashed down into Brutus’ stall and a tree had fallen across Quixote’s stall into Rio’s.
A tree came down into Rio’s stall (he was OK, too!).
Thankfully, their stalls are quite large, and they were not affected by the fallen trees at all. Once we cleaned up the ranch a bit, our first order of business was getting trees out of their stalls. Luckily Lori’s husband Ken was able to come out immediately with a chainsaw, and with his help- as well as several volunteers- we were able to cut up the branches into smaller, more manageable pieces with large pruning shears. It was a lot of work, and the wind continued to blow relatively hard, which made things just that much more difficult, but the volunteers worked very hard, and we got Brutus and Ruby’s stall done very quickly!
Cutting up the branches into smaller pieces
Taking pieces of the tree out of Rio’s stall
Megan and Jessica help by moving the larger pieces of the tree out of the stall.
The tree in Rio’s stall was a bigger issue as it was, well… a tree. Thankfully Ken was able to cut that up as well with his chainsaw. At that point, however, we had a lot of tree trimmings and no real place to put them. Megan remembered seeing a “Chipper Day” sign, and we confirmed it online- so we put the cut-up pieces into the back of the truck and Lori and Ken took two trips up the street.
The branches were all put into tubs to take down to Chipper Day!
All cleaned up!
The Hanaeleh truck takes a load of branches to Chipper Day.
Only a few hours later, the ranch was all cleaned up, the horses had all gotten out, and the wind finally died down. All that was left of the entire ordeal was the pipe corral that was completely bent when the tree came down on it. We were very grateful for the volunteers who helped us clean everything up, and we are also very thankful that none of the horses were injured!