 The evaluation process doesn't begin when you get to the tree that you're going to fall. It starts as you enter the stand and we use the same concepts where as we enter the stand, we start at the top, look for overhead hazards, come on down the stems of the trees, and then look at the ground underneath. In front of us here as we enter this stand, we can see that we have two stems here on this tree. One of them is broken off and you can see the top laid out here in front of us. The other one is still standing, but as we come on down the stem, you notice that there's some fungi or fruiting bodies growing on the stem, which are an indication of rot existing in the stem, which could cause failure similar to what you see here. As we look a little bit farther, we can see that we've also had a failure here of trees at the base in the roots caused by, we don't know what, but it makes a suspect of the root system in here. So now we keep going on into the stand using that same process, looking overhead as we come by this large pine snag here. If we look at the top, we see we have a lot of large heavy limbs up there. We see that some of them are broken off. As we come on down the stem, we see we have loose bark. As we come on down, we see some feeder holes from birds or woodpeckers, and then as we get onto the ground, we see the branches that have fallen from that tree. So this tells us that should there be a strong wind or something, there's a possibility that we could have some more branches coming out of this tree. So keeping these things in mind as we assess this work area for hazards, we look through here and we see we have a tree that's leaning at a pretty good angle in there, and we know that trees grow at an angle, but in this particular stand, we don't really have any trees growing at an angle, they're all pretty straight. So we want to keep an eye on that. It's an indicator there may be a problem out there. Come on in, keep looking up. We look off, we see we have more snags here off to our right. Come on in here. Same thing, we look up, we see we have a leaning tree over here, and we follow that stem down, and we see it's also a tree that's broken off, mid-stem, hit the ground, and now is leaning into another tree. Similar to the same type of failure we had as we began walking into the stand. It's important to remember how hazardous the removal of leaners or hang-ups are. In the timber industry, about one-third of all fatal falling accidents occur during the removal of hang-ups or leaners. So they're extremely dangerous and hazardous to work on. Notice it's a small diameter tree, it's still a hazardous tree, requires a high skill level to work on. We come around and as we're going to look at that other stem, we notice that we do have more small trees here, dead trees, snags. We've got a perceptual lean in here, we may have a fracture in this stem up here. It may be small, but small limbs, small branches such as this cause very serious accidents and sometimes even fatalities to people. So we look up as we come on around here, and as we get over to this leaner that we saw earlier, we've got a fracture in here, and so we come around and see that it's leaned off into another one that the top's broken out of and it's just kind of balanced there. Same situation as we saw as we entered the stand, we have a mid- or high-level failure in the stem because of the rot existing in this stand of trees. This is another one that's an extremely hazardous situation that takes an advanced or a good skill level, good high-skilled sawyer to work on or to identify as an unfollowable hazard and walk away from it. Now we picked this up using our process of top, down and looking around and we were able to identify it before we got here. So as we continue looking around in the canopy, over here it looks like we have the top of a tree that's pretty close to horizontal to the ground. And so we have a hazard here that we don't want to get under and we don't want to walk right underneath this to find out what's going on. So to get a better look at it, we'll walk back around the way we came in where we've known we can walk without exposing ourselves to any hazards. Always looking up and down as you go, evaluating the area. We come around here and the snag that we'd pointed out earlier, now we can see we've got fungus growing on it, indication of a rot in the stem there. And as we come on around to where we can get a better view of this top, we can see that we have an extremely complex situation here. It's hard to determine how to cut this tree if you can stand anywhere and safely cut this tree. You can't really determine what's going to happen with the top of that tree when you cut it. There's also other loose debris and overhead hazards hanging in that same tree behind it that it's hung up in. And so it's a small diameter tree, but yet it's a highly complex tree. And so in a situation like this, we may determine that we don't have the skill level available to fall this tree, and we may just want to ribbon this area off and keep everybody out, our hand crews, people cold trailing, other sawyers identified as a hazardous snow work zone and move on.