FORESTRY: 1.75 hours: 3:45 PM to 5:30 PM

Thinning and pruning with the hand saw in the south end of Eastern Wedge unit #5.

Forestry in Eastern Wedge unit #5: Thinning and pruning with the hand saws. Worked at the entrance to the unit from the path at the end of High Road in the SE corner of the property. Opened a hole in the “veil” of brushy hemlocks at the eastern edge of the clearcut. Massive amount of downed and leaning live and dead trees (16 year-old age class) made it extremely difficult to move around in this zone. Will need to return with the chainsaw to open it up and make the obvious removals of damaged vertical trees before further pruning. It was near dark and hard to see if the trees I was pruning were worth saving. Thickets of large salmonberry dominate and obstruct the understory, but they are at the “decrepit brush” stage, so I will cut them down and they will probably not regenerate in the darkness. Found an occasional viable Doug fir among the predominant hemlocks (along with what appear to be “dead stick” saplings), indicating that this is a Doug fir plantation “gone bad”. Still, there are enough well-formed hemlocks and alders present to make this a productive stand with a little thinning now.

ROADSM&R: 2.5 hours: 1:15 PM to 3:45 PM

Cleared off the last of the woody debris between the road junctions in South Side unit #4.

Finished clearing the road section between the first two junctions in South Side unit #4. Heavily impacted area with lots of downed trees, stumps and brush to pull. I had cut up most of the logs earlier, so it was just hand tossing and pulling – no chainsaw work today. This is a wide section of road through a section of un-harvested thin trees. Still some alder seedlings and saplings to pull out in the open section before the first junction, and plenty of dirt mounds to smooth out with a dozer or excavator later on. Took a photo showing the “carpet-bombing” effect of woody debris covering the forest floor.

Slashed storm and logging debris scattered on the forest floor.

A carpet of log chunks and branches is left on the forest floor after clearing the roads and thinning out the most damaged smaller trees in the stand. The road runs along the outside of the close-by trees on the right in this photo. This is roughly equivalent to the “lop and scatter” technique of slash treatment following a harvest. It is hard to tell if any slash treatment occurred after the most recent (2007/2008) harvest, as a simultaneous windstorm brought down far more wood than the logging debris left by the cutters.