Small-lot Forestry

[Montana_Sam]

I thought some of you might appreciate seeing the small-scale logging set up that we run out here in Whitefish, MT. This is not my equipment, a freind of mine from our Forest Service fire-fighting days started a fuels-reduction company about 18 years ago, and I regularly work with him on some of the more exciting and complex jobs.

The work revolves around a 3-point system of priorties, staggered in importance with each unique property. Fire prevention, stand improvement and wildlife habitat. Sometimes the three coincide, sometimes they do not. We are mostly hired by homeowners or HOA's to come in and thin anywhere from 5 to 50 acre stands of dense, untreated forest.

First comes the sawyers, who cut and thin to the desired specs, such as Douglas-fir and larch on 15' spacing. Next comes one or two smaller excavators with Valby grapple heads, piling and decking the material along our relatively narrow (8'-10') skid trails. After that comes the tracked Bandit 250xp, fed by an excavator, operated via remote control by (hopefully) me with a full mug of coffee up to 60' away. Chips get sprayed off into the newly thinned stand. Last comes a very unique little Vimek forwarder, loading the logs for transport to a landing, and loading dirty brush and stumps for transport to a burn pile at the landing. The Vimek is a workhorse, about as wide as a Tacoma and twice as long. Occasionally we bring in an older Bandit 250 to chip pulp logs for biomass, which gets sent and sold to a local mill for burning in their boiler, at something like $100/ton.

This is a super fun, profitable and busy little operation. The work is relatively safe and easy on the back with so many machines doing the heavy lifting. The hardest part is finding halfway decent young guys to run a saw all day who know the difference between an aspen and a birch. Nothing but problems with the tracked Bandit, at 100 hours it has so far had several major issues and does not chip anywhere near the capacity or speed of the old 250. However it both looks awesome and gets itself around in the woods exceedingly well, so we'll take it!

 

[snobdds]

I wish you were in Southern Wyoming, I could have used you. . When the pine Beatle came through in the early 00's, our Forrest got hit bad with dead trees. We had to take out hundred upon hundreds of trees. The Forrest serviced partnered with the state of Wyoming for grants to remove the trees. So we hired a company, recommend by the state, to take out the trees. It was a disaster. In fact one of their bobcats threw a track and it ended up staying up there all winter. Anyways they pulled off the job and we ended up buying a chipper, chainsaws, a backhoe and tons of other stuff and my dad and I did it ourselves. It's 80% done, but working on it still 15 years later. I probably wouldn't have learned all the stuff I know now ,if I didn't have to become a logger on the weekends. It's been fun. I know how fun it would be with more machinery like you guys have. You guys could have done this 4 acre property in a couple of days probably.

There were places that look like this...



Now look like this...

 

[ericm979]

This is really cool and we need a lot of these outfits all through the west. I wish you'd not call it logging though. Uneducated people often think logging is always bad. Fuels reduction is getting the forests back to their "natural" state. It's good for the forest and animals and people. It's all the better if we can use some of the products from the fuels reduction for something like biomass generation.

 

[newforest]

I would probably really enjoy this.

I work in the Great Lakes states species mix in “young age management,” which a friend of mine calls “the bastard step-child of the Forestry business.”

The next rotation is someone else’s problem, so very few care about what is going to be in that rotation.