Need close ups of the bark and twigs/buds or any new shoots to provide anything more than just a wild guess.

Likely aspen and most likely quaking aspen, Populus tremuloides, though I would love to see a closer photo of bark and branches to be sure.

WAG, based on location might be yellow birch, Betula alleghaniensis

Not yellow birch. Twigs are too fat.

i am about 1 1/2 hours from the Connecticut River Valley and so am basing my ID on what is growing in my woods.

Go with Babs’ advice, tangerinedoor.

Use of name quaking aspen for Populus tremuloides is more conventional, with P. grandidenta being called bigtooth aspen. Anyway I agree we can't get enough out of the photo provided to be very specific about what the tree is.

Thank you embo for the correction. I usually check and didn’t. I meant P. tremuloides which is what I have here, so corrected the original post. It is a fairly common early succession species here.

I believe I have a bunch of aspen on the property, but they don't branch like this one. Those boughs are so straight, like someone with electrocuted hair.

I can't get close to this tree. It's halfway down a cliff. No leaves yet, anyway.

What? No climbing gear?

Agree w/an aspen. Bigtooth aspen is not uncommon around here at the higher elevations, even occasionally seen as a canopy tree.

That looks like it, Babs. Boughs stick out very straight.

I only have one tree like that AFAIK.

So, the related question, if that's an aspen (which it looks like it might be), what are all the other trees that are aspen-ish but not the same. They grow like weeds. They do not have the same look as a comic-book figure with his finger in the electric socket. Branches curve more and the bark is deeply furrowed. The leaves look like this in the left foreground:

Yep, that was my lot before I built on it.

The leaves in the foreground appear to be a Betula sp. - Birch.

Alder? Betula?

More photos of the tree above that's on the left in the photo:

Yikes, right?

Same tree on left. They both had multiple trunks. Both of these trees are now gone, but I've always wondered what they are, and I bet they've spawned babies.

Those leaves with deeply furrowed bark might be elm, Ulmus. Were the leaves rough or hairy? How big were they?

A tree that would look similar would be European white poplar, Populus alba, tho I don't think that's the first tree you show. The big trees you show further down look like cottonwoods (closely related to aspens & poplars).

I'm thinking the photos I've posted have trees that are sort of similar, but maybe different.

So, I got the aspen thing. Tree #1

Then I have those two colossal trees. Tree #2 I would be very sad if these were elms that I took down, but they were soooo dangerous. I might actually be able to retrieve some leaves from the brush pile to help the analysis along. The leaves were not fuzzy/hairy/prickly.

Tree #3. And then I have some smaller trees that grow like weeds and may or may not be the same as the colossal trees. These smaller trees especially have flutter-in-the-wind leaves. The leaves are heart-shaped. I will post closer photos of these in a post below.

I, too, thought a lot of these trees were cottonwoods, but the locals say "we don't have cottonwoods around here."

In your second-to-last bottom pic, the leaves in the foreground-left are (probably) slippery elm, a common weed-tree in my area. But the large trees in the bottom pic are not slippery elms.

Bengz...you're saying the leaves in the left foreground don't belong to the big trees? That's a thought....

I love my jungle, but I'd also love to know what's in it!

Yes, I think the leaves on the "hanging" branches further away in the center of that pic belong to one of the big trees. And definitely a small black locust just behind the slippery elm leaves.

I didn’t realize that was a black locust. I thought it was dogwood. There were 3 of them.