Bringing Home the Bark!

I put an ad on Craigslist saying "Chainsaw Artist needs free logs for bench project."  A week later a guy sent a message saying he had felled a 150 year old cottonwood tree and offered the logs to me.

From a chainsaw carving point of view, cottonwood isn't desirable AND it stinks when you cut it.  It's not good firewood either because it produces more ash than heat. Naturally I wasn't very interested.

Two days later it dawned on me, "Cottonwood logs have cottonwood bark!"  LOL.  So I phoned Niel, whom I'd gotten my first bark from, and we headed to the pasture with the logs.

As you can see, we found plenty of very good bark.  This stack is the first of two loads we collected :)