Bark Beetle Planning

[slowp]

This has been going on for a while. In the late 80s and 90s I worked on some large (volume wise) lodgepole sales. There were more mills that would take it, and the larger logs were even being hauled to Missoula for house logs. The latter was an 18 hour round trip. They were running two shifts in the woods and could get 40 loads a day going to the local mills. The local mills capped the loads at half that. The buncher operator wished we had marked the sale in reflective paint.

I don't know if there is even much of a market, if they could do some logging. The comment about it would be a good thing to take the Grand Fir out and leave the Ponderosa and Larch but then it is Spotted Owl habitat kind of sums up the paralysis. It won't be good owl habitat after a fire burns through the area.

Sometimes, I just wish these experts would spend some time with loggers and learn some common sense
They need to spend some time away from each other, and out with the real people in the real world. Rant Over!

Local News | State scrambles to fight massive tree die-offs | Seattle Times Newspaper

 

[madhatte]

Sometimes, I just wish these experts would spend some time with loggers and learn some common sense.

On my planet, ypu can't be an expert on something you don't spend a lot of time with. "Paper-Qualified" is not enough.

 

[Gologit]

This has been going on for a while. In the late 80s and 90s I worked on some large (volume wise) lodgepole sales. There were more mills that would take it, and the larger logs were even being hauled to Missoula for house logs. The latter was an 18 hour round trip. They were running two shifts in the woods and could get 40 loads a day going to the local mills. The local mills capped the loads at half that. The buncher operator wished we had marked the sale in reflective paint.

I don't know if there is even much of a market, if they could do some logging. The comment about it would be a good thing to take the Grand Fir out and leave the Ponderosa and Larch but then it is Spotted Owl habitat kind of sums up the paralysis. It won't be good owl habitat after a fire burns through the area.

Sometimes, I just wish these experts would spend some time with loggers and learn some common sense
They need to spend some time away from each other, and out with the real people in the real world. Rant Over!

Local News | State scrambles to fight massive tree die-offs | Seattle Times Newspaper

Good rant. They'll dither around, appoint committees, do tons of studies, get conflicting advice from every expert on every facet of the problem...and in the meantime the trees are still dieing.

You hit the nail on the head...they need to get out from behind their desks and go to the woods. And they also need to learn to listen.

 

[RPM]

and unfortunatley the shelf life of dead standing pine is pretty short - maybe 5 years max before it falls over. Up here lately the solution has been pellet mills (for pellet stoves) or bioenergy (tub grinder into hog fuel) to convert the really dead stuff that is no longer millable.

Log it or loose it!

 

[Humptulips]

Driving over Bluet Pass this summer I noticed the entire area was filled with sick trees. Looked to be mostly Doug Fir. Just a tremendous resource going to go to waste. If it was a few smaller spots I'd believe a timber sale might happen but it is such a huge area that I know any timber sale large enough to do any good will produce only lawsuits.
It'd make a lot of jobs and the trees are doomed anyway but I predict a lot of hand wringing, committees and studies but nothing substancial will happen.
Seen the same type looking forest in part of the Pasayten a few years ago in the early high Buck season. It all burned a couple years later.
So we will have dead trees, no jobs and gridlock.
The President says we're lazy anyway.

 

[madhatte]

any timber sale large enough to do any good will produce only lawsuits.

Uggh, frustrating but true.

 

[slowp]

:bang: Being forced :bang: to sit in on many planning :bang: meetings, was hard on my :bang: patience.

When I worked on the Okanogan, we were able to put up some big lodgepole sales, but only because National Geographic aired a special on Yellowstone a few days before a show me trip with the residents who did not want any trees cut. Their main complaint was that the creek would dry up. As the lodgepole died, the water table was coming up, making some of the roads in the sale that had been OK a year or two ago impassible during the early summer.

One specialist insisted that trees and snags needed to be left standing along a heavily used hiking trail. We did, but they soon fell over. She did not understand that lodgepole snags do that.

Specialists seem to have tunnel vision. Some do not. The ones that do make things very frustrating. You can repeat and repeat that skyline logging is NOT harder on the ground than a skidder, but they shut it out.
You cannot possibly change their minds, or show them out on the ground. They have more formal education than you, and they cannot possibly make time to go out and see different logging systems at work. Therefore, each sale has a repeat, or even something added (silt fences around landings) that cannot be practical to do. So, changes are made in each contract, a yearly audit is done on one sale, the auditors point out that we put things in the contract that could not be done and the Sale Administrator's neck is sticking out, but that too is ignored and so it goes.

Humptulips is right on. People driving those areas say that the trees are all dying, it must be global warming.
What they don't realize is that trees have always had bug outbreaks and died, but we used to log them so they weren't visible for very long. That isn't done anymore. It hasn't been done for at least 20 years so a lot of dead trees have accumulated.

 

[Samlock]

and unfortunatley the shelf life of dead standing pine is pretty short - maybe 5 years max before it falls over. Up here lately the solution has been pellet mills (for pellet stoves) or bioenergy (tub grinder into hog fuel) to convert the really dead stuff that is no longer millable.

Log it or loose it!

A minor detail - how a tiny beetle can change people's lives faaaar away: Recently a major pellet mill, purchasing pellets all over Northern Europe, was closed down just 70 kilometers east from my place. Reason: The price of pellet in the Rotterdam harbor, shipped from North America, sank below the production expenses of that particular mill. The place is called Ilomantsi, that's a true backwoods front district. Not much industrial jobs available there. Fortunately the price of gold is up and still rising - they need to dig harder I guess. From the woods into the ground, for a bug's sake!

 

[floyd]

I was working near Susanville OR during the mt pine beetle epidemic.

Straight out of the Twilight Zone. I could hear the beetles munching on the bark.

In the 80's Puget Sound Trucking hauled chips to Longview Fibre straight out of the woods in Union County. BIG tub grinders on the landing.

 

[wowzers]

I have always heard that in a big outbreak you can hear the beetles in the trees. Never heard it myself though.

 

[Rounder]

Kind of neat to see.......Beetled logs sitting at the Stimson mill that shut down a few years ago, just down the road. Some crazy bastard with a grinder is going to have a go at it. Been getting to the point that you can't hardly give blued pine away.