Truck Road Video

[jwilly]

Here's a ride on the truck road to the landing. 6/10'ths from the road to landing.



Here last weekend's work, about 10 hours, 9000bf pine logs and 8 cords of pulp plus a few aspen and some firewood



Would have been more but it took awhile to get the loader going.

 

[1270d]

do you guys cut mostly pine or a mix?

 

[bitzer]

Do you have a guy or two workin for/with you? Hand cutting I'm guessing by lookin at butts. That looks like northern WI to me. I wish I had more natural conifers around here. I like being in the woods with em.

 

[jwilly]

My son cuts and skids with my grandson helping out on occasion. When Austin (18 year old grandson) is there he cuts down and his dad skids. He would rather cut down than run skidder. When they are both there they can bury me on the header with a fairly short skid. I buck the logs, sort and stack. We are only working weekends. This lot is predominately pine, estimated in 2004 at 1.2 million feet. There is some hardwood but it was all high graded in the past so what is left is usually pulp or firewood. This month we have cut about 20 cord of firewood and I got 6 mediocre logs. The entire property is 478 acres, 50 was cut in 2005 and we have cut 50 since we have been there. We also cut a neighboring 10 acre chunk that yielded 90,000+bf.

 

[bitzer]

That's pretty good bf per acre. Too bad the big piece you are cutting was high graded. I cut a piece like that 18 months ago. It had been high graded 10 years before. The guy who cut it at the time didn't have a market for ash. With EAB rampant here we cut the ash out of it. Even after the high grade was cut out it had some of the best timber I've ever seen. I would have loved to have seen the stand 15 years ago.

 

[jwilly]

There is some nice ash on this lot and the EAB isn't here yet so we are actually saving them. The first forester marked them all on the first section, his reasoning was they would die anyway. I listened to my log buyer and he said after everyone else around here has panicked and cut all the ash the price should go up. The second forester agrees. When the EAB gets here we will still have nice ash. They are scattered throughout the property making it harder for the EAB to spread. We also have some beautiful red oak on the opposite side of the lot, last summer we picked up some that had blown over. They weren't veneer but went for $550/mbf, not bad for salvage.

Here's a shot of what we are in now, taken last fall while I was scouting.

 

[bitzer]

That looks pretty similar to here. Our ash prices are not good because of so much on the market here. I'm 10 minutes away from where EAB was first found in WI. I definitely killed more ash than anything else in the area. All of our ash are really dying though.