Originally Posted by Tree Machine

I will always cut and lower in accordance with how the cleanup will take place. I never, ever lower gimungous stuff. If I can just drop the whole limb, and it makes sense to do that, then bombs-away, but rigging is a game of 'bigger is more dangerous'. More can go wrong, especially when you have obstacles. How will the material be removed, what can the groundguy handle, is a bigger rig faster than two smaller rigs?

I do all my lowering from up in the tree. I may be stepping out into a minefield of controversy here, but that is just how its always been. Between the lifting of the truck and trailer off the ground day, and the day of this mondo hackberry last week, I had let a ground guy lower something for me once. 10 years, once.

Aerial lowering isn't a method I employ in my rigging scenarios. It IS my method. It's all I know. I lowered all the material from this tree from up there. The bucket guy flew out there and tied off the limbs. One ort the other of us would cut, but I was in normal element lowering the stuff from aloft.