If I can reach it, it comes off. I'm pretty religious about that rule, seen a few guys get pretty badly hurt, getting snagged or smacked by limbs that shouldn't have been there. I've mentioned all this before, but this time I'll give an example.
My friend Zach was dropping a short bushy Pinion pine into a gully. Standing right on the edge of a steep rocky slope, he cleaned exactly what he had to off of the trunk. Three cuts went fairly smooth, and he ducked in to pop a wedge in and give a few smacks. About the third or fourth lick with the axe, and that twisty buggers hinge snapped as the tree went over.
A little twig, on the end of a small branch, snagged the hood of his sweatshirt. It broke off the branch almost immediately, but in that position, on that slope, it was more than enough.
Zach tumbled down the slope with the pine, at first just behind, but unfortunately the brush made the tree a bit slower than Zach's attempt at a tuck and roll, and he ended up under the sliding, rolling Pinion.
He wasn't under the tree for more than a second or two, before something on the slope changed the trajectory of both entities. In that second or two, Zach was impaled through his left lung, from the back, and his liver and diaphragm from the front.
He also broke two lumbar vertebrae, fractured his pelvis, broke a total of 11 ribs, crushed his zygiomatic arch, which nearly cost him his left eye, and a broken right wrist.
His brother, Luke broke his left ankle trying to run down the 200 foot of near vertical slope to help him, and took a pretty nasty tumble himself.
I had a really good view from about 100-120ft side hill from where Zach was cutting, as did my felling partner Craig, while we caught our breath after a pretty gnarly wedge beating.
It took us way longer to rig them out of the draw, with a Ford tailgate as a stretcher, than it did to drive them to the hospital.
Yes, there was a series of mistakes made, like not having a good escape route, etc. It was still that twig that took him over with the tree.
Moral of the story: Cut everything thing you can reach, because you don't want it reaching you.
