: Good luck with the construction. You're lucky to have such a great source of
: wood. Is this deadfall that gets washed out, or cut logs that got away
: from the timber companies? The best I can hope for here in Ontario is to
: use some of the cherry from my backyard pruning for some small accents.
: Otherwise its off to the lumberyard for me.

This log was likely an old blowdown that may have been buried in the riverbed further upstream. When the flood that broke it free subsided, we looked over the log and found no cut marks on the trunk, it had no bark and was soaked through. The cedar around here was pretty much logged off years ago, tho there is some second-growth around. The fact that it was thoroughly wet tells me it was under water for a long time and in such conditions it could remain rot-free for centuries. A few years ago a sound cedar log was found in the debris of a mudslide that was shown to have been buried just after the last ice-age!! Some guys around here have found that they could make a fortune digging up old logging sites and selling the old growth cedar that was either left behind or was used for fill to shore up a road or railroad tracks. Logging companies used to be amazingly wasteful. Now they take every scrap, sometimes even pulling the stumps out of the ground to use as hog fuel for power plants and boilers.