[Scott G]

John, do you have a pic of that?

[Scott G]

Logs stay cleaner when you’re yarding (floating) across the water, Simon? 🙂

[Scott G]

“Site Index Represents the height, at 50 years of age, of a typical tree of particular species growing on this site. It is used to evaluate site quality by determining the rate of tree growth. Determined from field observation, or from soils information.”

Or 100 years, which is what we typically use here in the central Rockies due to less productive sites. I would also add “dominants” in the definition.

Thanks for taking the time to paste this on the site, Carl. It would be a good tag to refer people back to.

[Scott G]

John,
Can you make something to be able to pin/snap into traditional harness? For example, something like the snap attachment shaft loop rigging I have for mine?

No D-ring available, just the trace carrier off of the back band/belly band strap.

[Scott G]

Just check with John. He is frequently on this site. John are you gonna weigh in or are you being modest. 😮

plowdenhorselogging.com

[Scott G]

All those in favor reply with “Aye”, those opposed reply “Nay”

[Scott G]

Glad it went well, Jason. Thanks for continuing to keep it in the public eye.

-Scott

[Scott G]

Well done, Carl.

If you take the path of forest health and forest improvement, emphasizing other ecological values rather than just timber, people seem to come around. You have to identify a landowner’s objectives first, go from there, and see if it is a situation that will work for both of you.
-Scott

[Scott G]

I grabbed ahold of my first set of lines when I was 19, I’m 47 now. At that time I was working at a dude ranch and guiding/outfitting. As I worked up into the years of being a head wrangler and foreman it didn’t matter how rough of a day it was, when I harnessed the boys up and took a few folks on a “backcountry” wagon ride it made everything all better.

I’ve made a few major detours in my life but I have kept revisiting those roots and here I am again.

To the young men/ladies on this forum; you are our future. Please get some some of your similiarly aged peers interested in this culture as well. You folks are the ones who are in charge of maintaining this way of life well into the 21st century.

Take care, be safe, and have fun…

[Scott G]

Attached is a pic of my barn I built about 16 years ago. All of the logs & beams came off the property. The vast majority were skidded with my single Belgian I had at the time and I milled all the logs and beams with an Alaskan chainsaw mill and beam machine. I two-sided the logs due to short logs so I could do decent half-lap joints to run the course. The foundation is solid rock that I laid up with rock from onsite A lot of sweat and a little blood went into that building…

Also attached is a picture of our house. The shell was there when we bought the place 20 years ago built on piers. I put the rock foundation under it as well and added a lot of exterior log and interior wood work. Again, alot of it done with a horse and an Alaskan mill.

Ripping that much wood with an Alaskan mill and beam machine took my sharpening and saw maintainence skills to a whole new level…

You can’t get the personal internal connection like that with a kit…

[Scott G]

90% certainty not honey locust, Gleditsia tricanthos. We have a lot of honey locust out here in our urban forests and the bark looks nothing like that. It is somewhat corky but has deep fissures in the more mature trees. I did a grad forest pathology project on Thyronectria canker in honey locust. Spent alot of time with my face in the bark. Robinia sp., is known as black locust out here and grows in fence rows, etc, out on the plains. I could buy that one accounting for regional phenotypic differences in growth and form.

If we want to do this right, take some close up pics of the binately compund leaves, twigs,thorns, bark, and cross grain and I/we can key it out. I have a pretty decent dendro reference collection.

-Scott

[Scott G]

Okay, now I have to laugh..

Yesterday I spent an incredibly enjoyable day hand-felling the corners out of a biomass project. Flat ground in lodgepole/pondo at 8,600′. Blue sky, foot of snow on the ground and no wind. So even we have a few sweet spots here in the Rockies.

Compare that with a 50% slope where you have to make sure you have you’re saw nestled on the uphill side of a tree when you set it down or go down the “slope” 50-100′ to retrieve it after it end-over-ends down the hill…:)

[Scott G]

@near horse 12780 wrote:

On a different note – Scott, that’s an interesting thought that having timber tracts subdivided and in the hands of various small owners might acually be of overall benefit to both the ecosystem and horse logging. So all the “hobby farms” aren’t the blight we were hearing about (perhaps it was another myth).

Geoff,
I don’t believe that fragmentation of land ownerships will be an ecological benefit as a whole. I do believe that peoples values on these smaller parcels will. And yeah, in my mind it is a slam dunk opportunity for horse logging if it is marketed and implemented correctly.

[Scott G]

Lance,

You and I must not have been attending the same webinar. Andy, who actually did the horse logging aspect of the study (he owns two mares and has done quite a bit in the past), was mentioning that it is a viable option. A few other foresters agreed and I did not see one comment to the negative. I did have some issues with Andy’s take on ground compaction and disturbance, but those were minor. Like most quality research, the numbers don’t lie. His study was geared towards impressions the public has of most aspects of the harvesting operation including visual, site impact, and noise levels. He showed short segments of video of each type of system with the relative amount of noise associated with it. Overwhelmingly, participants favored horses over the other methods although recognizing the decrease in productivity and increase in expense. This study was geared towards the increasing population of folks that have moved to the “rural” areas from urban areas. If people think of horse logging as “warm & fuzzy forestry” so be it. It is only another marketing tool for our toolbox; image is everything when it comes to marketing your operation.

This present situation plays into exactly what I have mentioned several times before. Even though from a “big picture” land management perspective the slicing and dicing of larger properties into smaller ones is a problematic and worrisome one, it plays directly into what draft animal powered forestry is really good at and stands to be the most financially appealing to an operation. These folks, as a majority, are more concerned with other values than just fiscal return on their timber. Aesthetics, recreational use, wildlife, and ecological integrity are more important to most.

The previous posts on this thread all point to this. Like Carl & Jason, I turn down probably 60% of people that approach me to do work for them. I am interested in working with people that are committed and want to be involved with the stewardship of their land. The type of folks I deal with are usually fairly well educated, affluent, and want to have someone working with them who is as well and has a high ethic when it comes to land management.

I’ve mentioned this before, do the exact opposite of what we do (hopefully) in harvesting operations “take the best and leave the rest”. These types of folks are out there; it just takes some effort and selfless marketing to reach them if they are not banging on your door.

[Scott G]

Geoff,

Long article so would be hard to address point by point.

Thom McEvoy has been around a long time, although as you can tell from the article he is referring to primarily hardwood management. In short, he is spot on when he describes silvicultural prescriptions. Selective harvest is not found in silvicultural text. In un-even aged management there is either single tree selection or group selection. Selective has become common phrase for single tree selection. That is usually thought of in a good connotation, as in what Jason, does “worst first” or also known as low-grading. Selective could also describe the exact opposite which would be high-grading or “cut the best and leave the rest”. I definitely do not agree with Thom’s premise that by removing inferior trees you are not improving the stand, or that by removing an inferior overstory tree in favor of promising regeneration you are not improving individual potential. That situation is referred to as crop tree management and is a true silvicultural prescription by definition.

The folks in hardwood country could better address appropriate silviculture in their region. As you know, for our region I primarily deal with pine, fir, spruce, and some aspen. I am a believer that even-aged mangement as a silvicultural presription is not evil in the appropriate forest cover type. I do believe that some implementation of even-aged management in the past has not been the most beneficial. My silviculture prof pounded in my head that clear-cut is a silvicultural prescription and that clear felling is the action. One of the best things that has happened to foresters in recent years is that they have learned that they don’t have to walk in a straight line and that smaller openings are good. We refer to these as “patch cuts” which are small (few acres) scattered across a treatment area in a mosaic pattern. Small irregular openings that play well into the historical disturbance regime of species like pure lodgepole pine stands that are adapted to, and depend on, stand replacement events to fully function and regenerate. That is a case where, in my region, even-aged management is the most appropriate. Go lower in elevation into primarily ponderosa pine and Doug-fir and even-aged management is the last thing that you would want to do. That forest cover type is best suited to single-tree and group selection. High elevation spruce and true fir, same thing, uneven-aged management.

These scenarios all play into what I rail about. Performing management for the forest’s sake first and then using the resulting product versus managing strictly for product at the expense of the forest. That situation is when you get into operational plans and harvesting methods that are based more on volume, cost, and expediency than what is best for the forest ecosystem.

Trees are the most incredible renewable resource that we have and can continue to have while existing in an ecologically functioning forest if we maintain our management priorities for the forest and not solely for product.

BTW, I hate diameter cut limits in western forests but we can talk about that later…:rolleyes:

[Author]

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