Loggers of Potlatch Part 1: Tree Felling

I suppose I should explain why I took my cameras to potlatch Idaho well my wife grew up here and of the 840 residents I think a couple hundred of them are now my in-laws and most of them work in the logging industry this last September my wife's uncle's were kind enough to take myself and my cameras out into the field with them the four brothers are Francis who runs a stroke to Wimmer Dwayne is a career tree feller Jimmy runs logging trucks and the baby of the family Matt runs the biggest machine of them all the line machine my name is Dwayne Larson and I've been falling trees for about 43 years I've been doing it for a while mainly on Idaho and Washington just the slow flow area I know you may have some presumptions about the logging industry so let me start off by saying that these loggers are not clear-cutting they are tree farming meaning they harvest and replant the same land about every 60 years no I might leave some of the smaller stuff this smaller stuff right here should have got been gotten by the buncher but I don't know why I didn't get it probably figured there's too steep for the Skeeter all right I'll go up start whipping her across the hill and see what happens you one of the things has changed over the years is it's for the better we have different class streams you have class one that have fish in them you know it's a fish bearing stream then you have your class to which you know has a water running in it or most of the year it has water running in it and class one you pretty much stay over a hundred feet away from that at least most of the time we're in over 150 to 300 feet away from class twos you can't get a machine any closer than 30 feet so all the class two streams if you want to take timber out of those has to be hand fell yeah when we get done with the logging operation then they usually bring in a whole and he puts in a fire line he'll pile areas that you want to make sure it burns so he'll put piles there and then they'll come in usually about a year later in the fall and they'll burn it and you know they want to get a good hot burn to where it gets most of the the slash out of the way and when they get done burning they usually wait about two years and they'll come back and they'll plant it and they always try to plant it to a specie of tree that they figure will be desirable in the future a cedars one that you know they really want right now but I don't think they consider the tree that grows fast enough to where it'll be economically feasible I guess is what you call it but yeah I don't know what's going to happen in the future because the intention is to relock the same yeah poor yeah they actually they look at a turnaround now of about sixty years from the time they plant until they rehearsed it'll be around sixty years and if they could they do it quicker but I got a hunch that would be there you know about when they'd be doing it I won't have to worry about it so have you logged places that have been that like twice you hit yes placing out I actually have I mean I have gone back the areas that I logged when I first started which was over 40 years ago and there were actually trees that were almost we put through that I had clear-cut when I first did it so yeah I mean the timber and a lot of place it comes back fast it's definitely a renewable resource the only timber ground now that I have a problem with is the Forest Service because they well that now they don't do any salvage sales and so now all you've got is a lot of areas where the timber that dies falls over and it's nothing but a fire hazard and the only people I see that it benefits of the wood cutters but as far as an unhealthy forest they've got a lot of them right now and I don't want to see any of them clear-cut but the mere fact that they don't do any salvage logging right now is something that really bothers me whether they're current well the way they have things set up now as far as if they put out sales it's a lump sum sale lump sum is where the logger comes in and he buys only the trees that are marked and when you're doing a salvage sale you have trees that are dead and dying when they mark and the problem with what they do now they go in and they'll mark these trees that are dead and dying and then they have to do an environmental assessment and other things and by the time they get all their environmental assessment all the other things they have to do it could be three years down the road and all the trees that they have marked are are rotten and they aren't good enough to make lumber on it so it won't work and the only way that they can make it work does go back the way it used to be where they had scale sales where when you went into a an area to salvage it they would have a forest administrator come in and he would be marking trees that are just going out so that those are the trees that you would be taking out and they would go to the mill and they would have a scaler come in and he would scale it and the logger got paid what he had bid for this contract and the rest would go back to the Forest Service and this benefited that you know the local schools the road districts it benefited everything and this is something that it doesn't happen anymore most people don't even know that that was the way it was I mean it used to be that the schools I don't know how much they got but it was a lot of money and it's not there anymore this is that saw I used to use when I was in a lot of the bigger timber it's got about a forty honey kitchen got 42 inch bar I this is the one you say you're gonna hang on your wall in return yep yeah I'm not going to have any timber to cut down with it anymore so I'll just hang it on my wall and use it for an ornament so still yep - Oh 84 good old sock well yeah I I want to stay fall and I don't want to get on one of those machines just because the fact that you get on one of those machines and you show that you can do a good job at it you might end up sitting on one of those things then and I just there's no way in hell I want to do that sit there and be bored all day long have much better run a chainsaw

Channel: You Can Build That

Views: 126,188

Rating: 4.7522769 out of 5

Keywords: logging, tree feller, lumberjack, sawmill, norwood, san juan carpentry, idaho, potlatch, skidding, Felling, chainsaw

Id: nhrfzYOnMdM

Length: 10min 8sec (608 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 21 2015