Murphy goes milling, and visits a "real" logging site

[mtngun]

Today's victim, a 16" doug fir blowdown.

Doing the initial slabbing cut on all three logs, so the Alaskan had to be adjusted for the slabbing cut only one time.

The rootball in the background belongs to a 24" ponderosa pine. There are several other large pine blowdowns in the area, but at the moment I am not in the market for pine.

As I started to slab the 3rd log, the chain grazed one of the drywall screws holding the end board. That dulled the teeth on one side of the chain and it cut crooked and bound up the bar. The drywall screw must have angled downward, into the chains path, instead of drilling straight into the log.

A fresh lo-pro chain was installed.

After an hour of run time, I installed another fresh lo-pro chain, but I must have not installed it carefully, because it instantly derailed, and dinged a couple of drivers in the process, so that they wouldn't lay in the bar groove. I didn't have a flat file to clean up the drivers, nor did I have my glasses with me, so I couldn't see the dings well enough to file them, anyway.

That was my last fresh spare chain, so I put the dull chain back on and filed it by hand as best as I could. I'm a poor hand filer, more so in the field, and more so without my glasses.

Then the top log was mini-milled into an 8x8, using the CS62.

On the very last pass, the CS62 refused to start. The Efcos are bad about hot starts in hot weather, with ethanol, anyway. Either vapor lock or watery gas, or both. It took me close to an hour to get the saw started.

Ended up with 10 boards, one 8x8, and the usual complement of slabs and firewood. Not a terribly productive day, and not much fun milling in the sun on this hot day, but I need the lumber.

 

[smokinj]

That sun is a killer! not bad in the heat.

 

[mtngun]

On a previous thread, someone had asked some questions about how logging is done in this area, so on the way home, I stopped by a logging site and took a few pictures. The loggers weren't working today, since this is Sunday.

The state forester had previously marked the "seed" trees with red paint. He selects the straightest and healthiest trees to be seed trees. They will be spared, and will furnish cones to naturally repopulate the area with new seedlings.

Usually red paint means "seed" tree, pink paint means "to be cut," and blue paint means "sale boundary," but that is by no means universal. There are literally thousands of painted trees in the forest, and sometimes it is a puzzlement to try to figure out what the heck it means.

Furthermore, private property owners sometimes mark their property boundary line by spraying orange paint on trees. After it fades, orange paint and red paint and pink paint all look about the same, so most people don't pay attention to orange paint on trees. If you want to mark your boundary line, you are better off using a fence and signs.

Getting back to logging ..... all the unmarked trees get cut. If a tree is too small or too crooked to be of value, it gets cut anyway, and will eventually be burned in the slash fire. About 80% of the trees get cut and the other 20% are left as seed trees.

I'm not sure what this kind of forestry management is called ? It's more than thinning, but less than a clearcut.

Many of the seed trees get damaged by the logging process. A felled tree might hit the seed tree, or the bark might get scraped as the skidder is dragging logs through the forest.

Later, when they burn the slash, the slash fire sometimes gets too hot and kills some of the seed trees.

Then a wind storm comes along, and without a thick forest to block the wind, many of the seed trees may get blown down.

After all the smoke has cleared, only 5% - 10% of the trees may survive, only slightly better than a clearcut.

This was attached to what otherwise looked like an excavator. I'm not sure what it is called, but I think it is used to rake up the slash and put it in piles, or to stack logs in a pile, or possibly to load the logs onto a logging truck. You guys who know more about logging are welcome to correct me if I get it wrong.

The excavator thing with a pile of doug fir in the background. This is all 2nd growth, so most of the trees are small. A 24" doug is considered a big tree around here. The doug will probably go to the local stud mill, which is set up to process these small logs efficiently. The stud mill supplies Home Depot and Lowes, so if you wondered where HD's crappy warped lumber comes from, now you know.

I'm told pine is used mostly for trim and molding. It's worth more if it has a blue stain.

White fir is usually hauled to the Lewiston, where it will either be chipped and barged downstream to processing plants on the Columbia River, or else made into paper at the Potlatch mill in Lewiston. Occasionally, white fir is sawn as a low grade lumber used for packing crates and such.

The white fir is kind of a trash tree, and depending on prices at the time, it may not be worth what it costs to haul it to the mill, so sometimes a lot of the white fir ends up getting burnt.

This might be called a delimber ? Anyone know for sure ? All the stumps on this site had been cut by a machine. Chainsaws are only used on very steep slopes where the machines can't go. Traditional loggers are almost extinct.

The business end. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe this has a hydraulic saw that cuts the tree at the stump, picks up the tree, strips all the branches off, then cuts the tree into logs of the desired length. No logger required.

 

[mtngun]

The picture shows after the trees have been cut and hauled off, but before the slash has been raked or burnt. It's a mess.

In my CSMing pictures, the slash is often hidden by grass and brush, but believe me, the forest floor is covered with logging slash. It's hard to walk (or drive) around without getting tangled up in logging slash.

Usually they rake the slash into piles. Then, after the autumn rains have begun, the forester sets the slash piles on fire. They prefer to burn the slash, because green slash is a breeding ground for pine beetles.

But, the slash fires create pollution. During the slash burning season, we have LA-type smog, sometimes for a month or longer, until a good soaking rain extinguishes the fires.

Literally tons and tons of slash get burned. IMHO, there's a lot of potentially useful biomass going up in smoke, and I'd prefer to see the slash used for some small scale biomass power generation like BobL showed us in Italy.

Besides using fire to control bugs, most western species are adapted to fire, and actually benefit from a low level fire to stimulate new seedlings.

These days, they rarely replant logged areas with seedlings. Instead, they rely on the "seed" trees and the slash fire to stimulate the growth of new trees.

The exception being tamarack, which is still planted here and there. Tamarack is a very desirable species, being harder than douglas, and more rot resistant. It was nearly wiped out by logging in this area, so they have been trying to replant it. I wish I could find some dead tamarack to mill, because it's supposed to make excellent flooring (by softwood standards).

 

[Woodcutteranon]

Wow...Thanks for taking the time and sharing these photos. I read every word. That looked like a good way to spend your Sunday. Sorry to hear about the bad luck milling...but you have a nice truck load there at the end of the day.

Thanks again.

 

[PineFever]

Once again a very informative and entertaining post!
Keep up the good work. Sorry about the milling woes.

 

[jimdad07]

Great thread, like the pictures. You've been busy.

 

[discounthunter]

cool post as usual mtngun.

 

[deeker]

cool post as usual mtngun.

:agree2:

Please continue.

 

[mtngun]

Please continue.

That's all I got today.

I'd love to spend a day hanging out with the forester and have him explain things to me, but our current forester doesn't seem real strong in the public relations department.

I'd love to talk to the loggers, but they are city people, and like all city people, they keep looking at their watch, acting like they are in a hurry, and the sky might fall if they stop working for a few minutes.

Sometimes when they are logging right next to the county road, I'll stop and watch for a few minutes.

Once, I did have a chance to ask a logger what his favorite saw was. Surely it would be a MS440 or a Husky 372? Nope, his favorite was a MS180. He said sometimes his machine tracks get tangled up with brush, and the little saw was just right for crawling underneath the machine to cut the brush free.

I'm hoping someone will come along and set me straight, but now I'm thinking the excavator thingy is a feller -- I couldn't see any kind of saw on it, but maybe there was one hidden somewhere. If it doesn't have a saw, only the grapple, then it might be called a loader.

Now I'm thinking the big-arse machine is called a delimber. Or, it could be called a processor, or a harvester, depending on exactly what features it has. Pretty spendy looking, whatever it is.

 

[deeker]

That's all I got today.

I'd love to spend a day hanging out with the forester and have him explain things to me, but our current forester doesn't seem real strong in the public relations department.

I'd love to talk to the loggers, but they are city people, and like all city people, they keep looking at their watch, acting like they are in a hurry, and the sky might fall if they stop working for a few minutes.

Sometimes when they are logging right next to the county road, I'll stop and watch for a few minutes.

Once, I did have a chance to ask a logger what his favorite saw was. Surely it would be a MS440 or a Husky 372? Nope, his favorite was a MS180. He said sometimes his machine tracks get tangled up with brush, and the little saw was just right for crawling underneath the machine to cut the brush free.

I'm hoping someone will come along and set me straight, but now I'm thinking the excavator thingy is a feller -- I couldn't see any kind of saw on it, but maybe there was one hidden somewhere. If it doesn't have a saw, only the grapple, then it might be called a loader.

Now I'm thinking the big-arse machine is called a delimber. Or, it could be called a processor, or a harvester, depending on exactly what features it has. Pretty spendy looking, whatever it is.

I wish I could afford some of their equipment.

The bottom pic is a delimber. And above it is a shovel/loader.

One of our local logging companies/mills....is good to deal with. I buy logs form them for the big milling stuff. When we need beams over 21' long and with 16-24" finish cuts.

I need to get a bid....or win a bid with the forus CIRCUS soon. Almost out of logs for my mill.

Heading out to the Utah desert next week to cut a few hundred 20+" dbh junipers for porch supports and 6x6 beams. And a bunch of fence posts.

A pic of what we call WRC on the mill. Or Utah Mt. Juniper.

Some of the fence post juniper....white juniper...

We use the 20"+ dbh for boards and beams.

A pic of the wood from these...

Kevin

 

[BobL]

good info Mtngun.

I was down at Lake Wassa (Cranbrook) in BC over the weekend - quite different from the Banff National park area, hotter and drier. It reached 90 on Saturday and 93F today.

 

[BIG JAKE]

Looks like you'll have plenty of blowdowns in the future Mtngun. It doesn't look as bad as clearcutting when they're done. Also makes forest fires much less likely and easier to control. Seedtree logging has a similar effect to real fire in that it also allows more sunlight to forest floor allowing browse, grass(understory), to grow that will bring in more wildlife/deer/elk in a few years.
Years ago when I built our cabin I took 66 logs down. I learned that not properly taking care of slash was detrimental to trees left standing as the insects(beetles and termites) would hit the slash and often then hammer the surrounding trees, killing them. As far as pollution from slash fires go, consider how much less it is than allowing nature/forest fires to do the same job. Yellowstone fires from a few decades ago are a good example. The tree huggers wanted to leave it natural but after the fires there was nothing left but sterilized soil it burned so hot they couldn't put it out. Logging is a much better alternative that is sustainable. Instead of all the lumber burning up you can build things with it.
How many bd ft have you milled so far this year Mtngun?

 

[mtngun]

after the fires there was nothing left but sterilized soil it burned so hot they couldn't put it out.

Yes, that can be a problem. Then nothing will grow except weeds. Sometimes that happens with slash fires, too.

However, the sterilized soil problem is even worse in 2nd growth forests, because the trees grow closer together and there is more brush.

It is amazing how much gets burned in slash fires. When lumber prices are low, they will only cherry pick the more valuable logs and burn the rest. Sometimes they burn more logs than they haul to the mill. All I'm saying is, if they are going to burn it anyway, why not generate electricity in the process ?

The big Idaho fire of 1910 changed America's outlook on forest fires. Before 1910, we used to "let it burn." After 1910, Smokey the Bear told us to prevent forest fires. It is debatable whether this is a good thing.

How many bd ft have you milled so far this year Mtngun?

Not enough. I plan to build a barn and still don't have enough lumber.

 

[huskyhank]

Thanks for the great report and photos.
I'd rep ya' if I could.

 

[BIG JAKE]

I wish I could afford some of their equipment.

The bottom pic is a delimber. And above it is a shovel/loader.

One of our local logging companies/mills....is good to deal with. I buy logs form them for the big milling stuff. When we need beams over 21' long and with 16-24" finish cuts.

I need to get a bid....or win a bid with the forus CIRCUS soon. Almost out of logs for my mill.

Heading out to the Utah desert next week to cut a few hundred 20+" dbh junipers for porch supports and 6x6 beams. And a bunch of fence posts.



Kevin

You making a living milling Kevin? Way to go!

Thks for posting-

 

[deeker]

You making a living milling Kevin? Way to go!

Thks for posting-

Yes, sir.

The Utah weather is always making it interesting though.

Rain and lightning or 98 degree blazing heat.....same day.

:greenchainsaw:

 

[BC WetCoast]

On a previous thread, someone had asked some questions about how logging is done in this area, so on the way home, I stopped by a logging site and took a few pictures. The loggers weren't working today, since this is Sunday.

The state forester had previously marked the "seed" trees with red paint. He selects the straightest and healthiest trees to be seed trees. They will be spared, and will furnish cones to naturally repopulate the area with new seedlings.

Usually red paint means "seed" tree, pink paint means "to be cut," and blue paint means "sale boundary," but that is by no means universal. There are literally thousands of painted trees in the forest, and sometimes it is a puzzlement to try to figure out what the heck it means.

Furthermore, private property owners sometimes mark their property boundary line by spraying orange paint on trees. After it fades, orange paint and red paint and pink paint all look about the same, so most people don't pay attention to orange paint on trees. If you want to mark your boundary line, you are better off using a fence and signs.

Getting back to logging ..... all the unmarked trees get cut. If a tree is too small or too crooked to be of value, it gets cut anyway, and will eventually be burned in the slash fire. About 80% of the trees get cut and the other 20% are left as seed trees.

I'm not sure what this kind of forestry management is called ? It's more than thinning, but less than a clearcut.

Many of the seed trees get damaged by the logging process. A felled tree might hit the seed tree, or the bark might get scraped as the skidder is dragging logs through the forest.

Later, when they burn the slash, the slash fire sometimes gets too hot and kills some of the seed trees.

Then a wind storm comes along, and without a thick forest to block the wind, many of the seed trees may get blown down.

After all the smoke has cleared, only 5% - 10% of the trees may survive, only slightly better than a clearcut.

This was attached to what otherwise looked like an excavator. I'm not sure what it is called, but I think it is used to rake up the slash and put it in piles, or to stack logs in a pile, or possibly to load the logs onto a logging truck. You guys who know more about logging are welcome to correct me if I get it wrong.

The excavator thing with a pile of doug fir in the background. This is all 2nd growth, so most of the trees are small. A 24" doug is considered a big tree around here. The doug will probably go to the local stud mill, which is set up to process these small logs efficiently. The stud mill supplies Home Depot and Lowes, so if you wondered where HD's crappy warped lumber comes from, now you know.

I'm told pine is used mostly for trim and molding. It's worth more if it has a blue stain.

White fir is usually hauled to the Lewiston, where it will either be chipped and barged downstream to processing plants on the Columbia River, or else made into paper at the Potlatch mill in Lewiston. Occasionally, white fir is sawn as a low grade lumber used for packing crates and such.

The white fir is kind of a trash tree, and depending on prices at the time, it may not be worth what it costs to haul it to the mill, so sometimes a lot of the white fir ends up getting burnt.

This might be called a delimber ? Anyone know for sure ? All the stumps on this site had been cut by a machine. Chainsaws are only used on very steep slopes where the machines can't go. Traditional loggers are almost extinct.

The business end. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe this has a hydraulic saw that cuts the tree at the stump, picks up the tree, strips all the branches off, then cuts the tree into logs of the desired length. No logger required.

I can add a few comments for people's clarification.

Selection harvesting systems come in many variants depending on the strategies established by the land owners, seed tree selection systems being one of them. BC has pretty much done away with this system as there are mandated time limits for having a new stand reestablished and waiting for seeds to establish is inconsistent. Usually in this form of harvesting, the number of trees retained is usually greater than the desired number to allow for some loss due to breakage/rubbing etc.

Harvesting systems vary from region to region. I'm surprised to see a lot of slash in that area, I would have expected there to be whole tree skidding with the delimbing being done in the landing. This would save the amount of piling required in the bush.

I couldn't really tell what the excavator pic was, it could either have been a butt'n'top loader or a feller buncher. The butt'n'top is a log loader that can easily spin logs around, makes for more efficient log loading on the trucks. The feller buncher, fells the trees and then piles them so a grapple skidder can take them to the landing.

White fir is one of the Abies species and is a poor lumber tree, although here it is mixed in with pine and spruce and called SPF (spruce/pine/fir). Here in BC, we have higher utilization standards due to most of the wood being a public resource (and the gov't wants their revenue), so little sawlog size material regardless of species would end up in the burn pile.

Called a stroke delimber, strips the branches and cuts the top at either a specified size or a specified length.

 

[BC WetCoast]

The picture shows after the trees have been cut and hauled off, but before the slash has been raked or burnt. It's a mess.

In my CSMing pictures, the slash is often hidden by grass and brush, but believe me, the forest floor is covered with logging slash. It's hard to walk (or drive) around without getting tangled up in logging slash.

Usually they rake the slash into piles. Then, after the autumn rains have begun, the forester sets the slash piles on fire. They prefer to burn the slash, because green slash is a breeding ground for pine beetles.

But, the slash fires create pollution. During the slash burning season, we have LA-type smog, sometimes for a month or longer, until a good soaking rain extinguishes the fires.

Literally tons and tons of slash get burned. IMHO, there's a lot of potentially useful biomass going up in smoke, and I'd prefer to see the slash used for some small scale biomass power generation like BobL showed us in Italy.

Besides using fire to control bugs, most western species are adapted to fire, and actually benefit from a low level fire to stimulate new seedlings.

These days, they rarely replant logged areas with seedlings. Instead, they rely on the "seed" trees and the slash fire to stimulate the growth of new trees.

The exception being tamarack, which is still planted here and there. Tamarack is a very desirable species, being harder than douglas, and more rot resistant. It was nearly wiped out by logging in this area, so they have been trying to replant it. I wish I could find some dead tamarack to mill, because it's supposed to make excellent flooring (by softwood standards).

Slash management is usually related to ecosystems, whereas in some ecosystems it is better to retain the slash.

Some slash is desireable as it provides shade (cooler soil temperatures) for the new seedlings and can provide habitat for a variety of small mammals (eg mice), which become food for larger animals.

A number of people around here have looked at the feasibility of using forest biomass for energy, especially with the vast amount of beetle killed pine now degrading past the stage for lumber production. Unfortunately, it is the transportation costs that kill the potential. Think of it this way, all the slash on that site would keep an energy plant running for about an hour. That would be a lot of equipment and time (including mobilization and demobilization of equipment) for not a lot of kilowatts. That is why most existing wood fired generation plants are located near sawmills where they get their fuel as a byproduct.

 

[mtngun]

in some ecosystems it is better to retain the slash.

Yes, sometimes they leave the slash on the floor. Other times it goes in a big pile. Or a little of both.

The most obvious reason to leave slash is to control erosion on hillsides.

On the other hand, the slash may not burn easily unless it is piled, and they prefer to burn it to control insects.

The state forester dictates the rules for handling slash, and the rules may vary from one timber sale to the next. Sometimes the rules make sense, other times they don't make any sense at all.

Unfortunately, it is the transportation costs that kill the potential.

Agreed, it would not be feasible to truck the slash to civilization for burning.

But, what if you trucked the biomass plant to the forest ? They make portable biomass power plants that can be towed around on a semi. It just needs a landing and a place to plug into the grid.

It so happens that the state has a firefighting camp about 10 miles from this logging site that has power, housing, and level ground. Set up a portable biomass plant at the fire camp, and truck the slash to the fire camp.

Transportation costs are very high for the white fir. It's an all day round trip to truck it to the port of Lewiston, then it still has to be barged downstream.

If there were a paper mill closer to the forest, then perhaps white fir would be better utilized.

As it is, there is only one paper mill in the state (all day round trip) and that mill has their own timber land, so they don't buy many logs.

Basically, the supply of white fir exceeds the demand.

Here's what the Idaho Forest Produts Commission says about white/grand fir:

Data from the Idaho Panhandle National Forests in the Northern Rockies, suggest a 300 percent increase [in white/grand fir].

Causes of the increase include fire suppression, white pine blister rust, and selective harvesting practices that decreased the historically abundant pines and larch and allowed the shade-tolerant grand fir to increase. On drier grand fir sites, frequent surface fires historically maintained open stands of fire-tolerant ponderosa pine with some Douglas-fir. On cooler and wetter sites where fires were less frequent, open stands of western white pine, Douglas-fir, western larch and sometimes lodgepole pine occurred. Grand fir now dominates on many of these sites.

Grand fir is highly susceptible to drought, wildfire, and several damaging insects and diseases. Extensive mortality periodically occurs from fir engraver beetle, particularly following drought, or when it is infected with root rot. It is also impacted by outbreaks of defoliating insects. In the Northern Rockies and northeastern Middle Rockies, it is highly susceptible to root diseases. And the increase in dense, often multi-storied stands of grand fir also creates a growing risk of large severe fires.

Often mistakenly called the "white fir," the grand fir is one of seven "true fir" species in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Once limited in range to northern California and southern Oregon, the grand fir has extended its range significantly, a beneficiary of man's fire-supression efforts over the years. The grand fir, once the victim of fires that ravished our forests, has extended its growing range into areas that once were dominated by ponderosa pine and other fire-resistant species, now that humans make every effort to quickly supress forest blazes. The grand fir has become one of the most prolific trees in the Idaho forest.

In other words, western forests are chock full of unhealthy, fire prone white fir thanks to Smokey the Bear and "cut the best first" forestry practices.

The forestry practices have been corrected, now they cut the "worst first," but we are still stuck with Smokey the Bear.

They didn't seem to be doing any yarding on this particular sale, but if I ever have a chance, I'll try to get pictures of a yarding operation. It's more interesting, and they still use chainsaws, but it can be very dangerous.