Forestry Friday … Mechanized Harvesting
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Tag Archives: skidder
Forestry Friday … Processing Logs
This crew is getting ready to start shipping logs. The loader hasn’t arrived yet. The skidding crew is getting trees to the processor. The processor is making logs so there will be enough to load the trucks first thing in the morning. I don’t usually get a shot of the processor working by itself without the loader parked beside it.
Road Work Art Work
I’m an opportunistic artist. Time for making art is precious, so I find it where I can.
Click on the gallery if you want to get stuck at the road construction with me. Who wouldn’t, right?
Morning finds me stopped at a road widening project on Buckhorn Summit. Sometimes the traffic waits thirty minutes. Once I finish making business calls and checking email, I pull out my drawing pad. I just started inking a chipmunk. It makes time fly.
Finally, the traffic is moving. They’re using a skidder to move logs off the road cut.
They even have logs stacked up on the bank ready to go to the mill.
They brought in a yarder to pull logs off the road cut to a loader waiting below. This looks more like a logging job then a road project. They’re yarding downhill, which is a much more dangerous than yarding uphill.
It’s afternoon and I’m headed back to town. Once again I’m waiting at the traffic control. Time to put a little more ink to paper. It’s amazing how much you can do while waiting in traffic control.
Rolling past the yarder again. I’m on my way home.
Forestry Friday … It’s Summer Loggin’ Season
Logging is in full swing and the dust is flying. It’s dry out there and the crews have their fire tools sharp and fire pumpers full.
Craig winds his dozer down the skid trail.
A skid of logs chattering toward the landing.
A load of logs pulls out of the landing. I hope you don’t mind a little dust.
How Is A Forester Like An Artist?
The forester and the artist both create landscapes. Only a forester’s canvas is far larger than an artist’s canvas. The artist uses pencils, pens, brushes and all the other tools that create the play of color and light on paper. The forester’s tools are far larger, louder and powerful. They are the skidders, feller-bunchers, chainsaws, yarders and seedlings. Okay, I know what you are thinking, what kind of baloney is this guy selling. When we look out at a forest we see a beautiful thing. Harvesting trees changes how that forest looks and develops. The conventional wisdom may be that harvesting trees makes a forest ugly and at stages along the way I would agree. That is all part of the process. When an area is burned in a wildfire and the salvage harvest is complete it looks pretty bad to most folks. This is only one stage in the development of an ever-changing picture. Soon the seedlings come and it is no longer a barren clearcut, but it is a brand new forest.
A new forest rising from ashes of a wildfire.
Each year the trees grow and the picture is adorned with deer, turkeys and other wildlife that forage in this new forest. As a forester I relish the changes I see with each passing year and how our work adds to the picture. For a forester the picture is never done so we have to appreciate it for what it is at this moment in time. Most folks have memories of that favorite camping spot in the forest that they went to as a child. Memories that are so striking and indelible that they cannot imagine them ever changing. However, these forest change every day. Mostly slowly, but sometimes in blazing moments. To the forest the changes are not good or bad, but simply different. To the forester it is a canvas on which to apply his or her trade. The forest changes and grows and our pictures change with it. We may not always agree on what makes beautiful art or a beautiful forest, but I hope as practitioners of the trade we are passionate and dedicated to the process.
I did this watercolor for the children’s book Firestorm In The Forest , a Red Tail Publishing book.
As an artist working in the forest provides an endless source of subjects to paint or draw. Never stale and always changing. I never know when I will come across a bear crashing through the brush or a dramatic vista that will make me pause for a minute to take it in.
THE FORESTER ARTIST 