The rings on the cherry will change back to white after a while and the heart will get dark.
You could be right about the sassafras too, it would be easier to tell if there was a photo of a stick stood up vertically so you can see the bark pattern better.
I cut firewood all the time, that is black cherry & sassafrass.
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I think you are right on the second one ( first one being cherry was never in question ) No sassafras around here but it fits with the pic and the description of sassafras .
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It’s sassafrass. I looked at it closer today. That is kind of cool because a lot of wood turners love sassafrass. I’ve heard it’s really easy to work with. Thanks for your help everyone.
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I unknowingly cut down a really big sassafras a few years ago for fire wood. It was dead so no leaves and it was much bigger than any sassafras I had ever seen. I really thought it was a hickory with odd bark, ( we have a few different kinds here and the bark can vary) when I started cutting blocks off of it I noticed the wood looked way too dark for hickory. So I shut the saw off and looked a block over, it was way too light for hickory. It wasn’t much good for heating wood but it would really get a fire going. It was super straight grain and you could nearly split boards out of the big blocks from the trunk.
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I like to use the dead sassafras twigs to build a fire in my weber grill. I fill it up light one twig with a match and use it to light the bottom of the pile. I add bigger chunks of hardwood or fruit wood on top to get it chard Then I throw the grate on top to burn the crap off. Give it quick brush to knock the ashes of the grate and it’s ready to cook in ten minutes. The twigs seem to have a wax coating that make them burn good. That’s why I start it with sassafras. I don’t need lighter fluid.
Seems to me that could pretty well describe alder; we have quite a bit of that growing around here and I scavenged some for camp wood. About the best thing you could say about it was that it burned pretty clean. And it does split clean and straight.
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I took this pic of the bark when I was at the site today. The whole tree was covered in lichen so kinda hard to get a good look.
Here is another pic from yesterday. The scarring is from me pulling the tree over with an excavator. As you can see the tree had some kind of disease from the inner wood.
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I was going to vote Prunus serotinum too, like johnnysapples. A neighbor pulled down one and I inoculated it with shiitake. both the bark and the ratio of sapwood and heartwood concord with the hypothesis.
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The bark in the first pic seems a little loose for sassafras but in the second it looks more correct, around here people cut it and make hillbilly crafts out of it because it holds is bark. Let me see if I can find an Internet image…
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You can build a fire with dead sassafras twigs even if everything is wet if you get stuck in the woods and have to spend the night,
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It helps to pick the dead ones on the trees too. The ones on the ground when wet can be soaked.
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Late to the game but I would’ve said like Matt did that it could possibly be Red oak. Sassafras is not something I see, so I wouldn’t know. Cherry is the easy identification. I assume it is Prunus serotina… might be another species.
Dax
I really do think it is some kind of oak.
But it is much lighter than the cherry. Oak is technically heavier than cherry. Neither of these trees were dead. They were both ripped directly out of the ground with an excavator all in a matter of about 20 minutes. None of those logs shown were dry cured wood. They were all green and the photo was taken 2 hours after cutting the wood.
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I don’t think the wood looks correct at all for red oak. Red oak should be somewhere between light pink or darker. This is red oak in my wood pile
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I did some more research. I’m 99% sure it’s White Oak. I’m part-way through training to become a certified arborist.
I don’t want to sound like a naysayer but that can’t be white oak either, white oak bark is very white and in longer strips and flaky, the flakes are very thin also. It is very light colored inside with not a huge difference in color between the heart and sap wood. I walked across the pasture and took a couple of pics of a sassafras, kind of hard getting a good shot of it at night but here it is. The bark doesn’t match speedsters ph
oto exactly but as I look at the pictures I took I realize how hard it is for a camera to capture all of the details that our eyes pick out so easily.