When I was one year old my dad bought this. He paid $300 for it. It's 80 acres.
And then nothing was done until 2007. And the portion in here that's now reprod was logged then.
Mapleton as you know is kind of unforgiving territory.
We get, especially on this site here, about 100 inches of rain a year.
And we have really clay soils.
Really there's no flat ground here.
You knew that whatever was to happen here is going to be challenging.
When they logged it prior, they logged what they could
and what was remaining was either going to have to be a downhill logging show
or it was going to have to be a helicopter logging show.
We could have taken 100 loggers out here in Oregon and Wayne would probably be the only one beside
the helicopter that would have had a great amount of interest.
He's in the five percent at least of, of qualified and willing to do this job.
No, I like the challenge of it, you know, rather than
just take a run-of-the-mill job all the time.
So there's a small fish stream that comes up through the main body of this harvest unit
and there's also, since we're in the Tyee Core, there is high landslide hazard locations.
and there was some significant, you know, kind of worry with me, considering the parking lot down below.
The access to Sweet Creek Falls Park is on our property.
The biggest concern that I had and probably the biggest goal
was that we not impact the Sweet Creek Falls Park and the public.
I didn't want to have logging get a bad name.
So we knew we had to have the wildlife retention trees, we knew we had need to have at least the 50-foot small-fish buffer retention,
and we need to determine where the end of fish is.
And we knew that we needed to protect the high landslide hazard location area.
This is really rugged stuff and the first day I met Wayne I brought him out here and we climbed all over it.
It was just steep ground. I mean it was tough ground to get around on.
The yarder they brought in, that 110 foot BU-199, I mean it was a 265-270,000 pound yarder.
It took a crane to set up.
I'd say the the older age class of trees was mostly around 130 years old.
That meant that a big tree could be four to five feet in diameter
and might have as much as 150 to 200 feet maybe max worth of timber volume within it.
Well not very many guys want to use a mid support with that bigger wood in a clear cut.
I mean a lot of guys thin mid support, but the strain isn't there.
And I guess we're willing to take the risk.
When everything was happening and you came out and you watched, it looked easy.
But if you, you got out on the hillside and looked there was times where they had two intermediate support trees and cables
going in more directions than the average person would have had a clue what was going on.
But every one of those had a purpose.
Then you had that creek right by the yarder that you had to full suspend over because,
that was important because that creek went right into Sweet Creek, the hiking trail right by it.
Then you had to suspend over the buffered creek between the mid support and the tail tree
and you had to protect Nancy's reprod the best you could.
He had to determine profiles being that everything that was logged was downhill.
They had to figure out if they could get lift over the the ridges and make sure they had the capacity
to pull the size of logs that they were going to be bringing in.
So there was a lot of footwork determining every setting, every set of lines that went out
and if, if it was feasible, if it was possible and how we were going to get it to this road.
The guys out in the brush had to know what they were doing getting those big logs over those supports.
I mean they got to know when to slack it down,
when to pick it up, how tight to run the skyline,
when to buck a log, when not. Some of the logs are in tough spots to buck.
We've got, we've got an excellent crew and they they know what to do they got all the logs in and then just they seem to go
above and beyond on keeping it clean they they pulled all the logs off the hill that were even
all the way down to the tops, which was impressive. That was a concern that we'd have too much slash.
We started the project the first or second week of January. We finished it first, first week in June
so that was six months and we had COVID going on in the middle of that.
The greatest accomplishments were they never got injured, they managed to get all the logs over the hill,
they managed to pull the logs over a stream buffer without wrecking it and keep the water clean.
I never got a single complaint in six months and I've never gotten more compliments from a
logging operation in an area than in this one.
I would say it was above and beyond anything I've seen.
This was a tough job and he pulled it off.
I think he kind of hit it out of the park in this one.
Yeah, I think it looks real good when we left, yeah.
It turned out perfect!