So the boy, the dog and I were hiking on Sunday and there was a tree over the trail and I pulled my Big Boy out of my pack and took care of it in a jiff.

As an aside, does anyone even say, “In a jiff” anymore?

It was something my mother always said, “I’ll be there in a jiff.”

Jiff being short for jiffy.

But back to my Big Boy.

It’s a saw, of course. A Silky Saw, which are made in Japan and are very sharp.

It folds in half and I bought it earlier in the winter just to keep handy in my pack and then the windstorms of December blew in and then more just a few weeks ago and then just one the other day, so the saw has seen plenty of work this winter, to the point where I might get a new blade soon enough. Not that the one I have is worn out, but just to have one on hand.

The Silky Saw Big Boy has a 14.5-inch blade that I found will cut about an 8-inch diameter tree (or branch as the case may be), but it will take awhile.

The problem with cutting downed trees over trails is about half of them have fallen so they’re going to do everything than can to pinch the blade, as they’re often at an obtuse angle. Sure, you can use wedges, but then you have to carry something to pound them in.

The perfect down trees have the tip of the tree sticking up, so you just have to cut a hinge on the downward side and the top cut snaps off before you’re halfway through.

The worst ones are big trees that have slammed into the ground and the tip of the tree is pointed down. Those require plenty of notching and a little cursing and some might take a half hour to get through, making you wish you just lugged a chainsaw in. (Which I have done, an electric one, so I don’t have fuel leaking all over the inside of my pack.)

Most of the trails we’ve hiked this winter have had innumerable trees down. I started cutting some of them out in December because I figured it would snow eventually and it’s real tough to ski over a tree that’s three feet off the ground and 60 feet long.

But then it never snowed so I changed my standard to trees that were simply annoying, which turned out to be almost all of them anyway.

The Big Boy only weighs a pound, so it’s always in my pack. We try to cut trails out to the four foot standard, which is to say four feet on either side of the trail, but with the big ones, it’s all I can do to cut a hole in the tree so we don’t have to crawl over it or under it. 

(The four-foot standard is a standard for stock, so, in theory at least, two parties could pass each other on horse if the trail is 8 feet wide. The standard has another benefit: It gives a person a nice line of sight, which comes in handy if there’s a grizzly on the trail, which has happened to me more than once.)

The other nice thing about the Big Boy is it doesn’t cost too much for what you get, which is to say $104.99 for the saw and $74.99 for replacement blades.

At any rate, this hiking season promises plenty of trees down and not enough trail crews as usual. 

You might want a Big Boy in your pack, too. Especially if it’s a trail you often hike.