So this unit is called Second Chance and it is being logged by J.M. Browning Logging on
Agency Creek Management's land affiliate of Hampton Forest and it's a smaller unit but
what made it tricky was that on three sides it's bordered by two small fish streams and a
medium fish stream that all flow into Big Creek, which is a large, fish-bearing stream
and the landowner, the foresters that laid it out, have left the full intact buffers
required under the Forest Practices Act so the small, fish-bearing streams have a 50-foot buffer
no touch on either side of the stream and the medium has a 70-foot buffer.
It's a big challenge to make sure you're not getting any turbidity into the creek. You know,
you want to make sure you're staying away from it, you're not crashing trees through the buffers.
Months prior to him even starting this job he was already thinking about it, planning it,
walking it, really figuring out how am I going to log this to be efficient and safe and productive.
You know, typically we get in those situations we like to suspend that skyline, come completely up and over.
And he said, "I think I'm going to bring my big yarder out for it."
So when he started talking about you know investing money back into this yarder and getting it into service
you know I was thinking, boy that's the, you know, this might be my only opportunity to
to log that particular piece of timber and protect all the resources which surround it.
I would come up here and I'd just stand on the landing and just look you know. What are we gonna do?
And my youngest son was up. He goes, "Dad, what if you put the yarder up on that, on that stub?"
I'm like, you know, that's not a bad idea.
By moving the yarder up on the hill it also gave 40 more feet of lift
which was going to lift the skyline, which is going to allow the logs to be higher in the air,
less likely to not, to damage the riparian management areas, the stream buffers.
I probably put in a good 140 hours with the backhoe just getting things ready for the yarder.
Well the 739 is one of the biggest gadgets made. It's got big drum capacity and a lot of power
um and you know this is, this is a skyline that's 4,800 feet to the back end.
My first thing I did was punch this road down here. We spent three days rocking this road.
Well, getting yarder in here took three days to go about a thousand feet.
We finally got that in.
Okay, we got a couple challenges taken care of. Then it's time to string the road line.
The drone saved two, two and a half days of man-hours to go from the landing all the way to the back end.
Another resource that required protection in this sale was the reprod there is, that's a younger forest that's
approximately 22 years old. And so we need to be careful that the logs didn't damage those trees
by breaking out the tops or sidewashing, which is kind of taking the limbs off one side of the tree.
You know the challenge for the logger is how is he going to protect those trees?
And how they were able to protect those trees was by having designated corridors a well thought out logging plan and deciding that they were,, okay, this is the bearing we're going to follow
and this is where the skyline's going to go, so we're going to cut these corridors out.
And when they did that they minimized the width of the corridor.
We knew the philosophy of it, of the job, was to try to buck as much as we could so they could
fully suspend as much as they could through that reprod.
They put a shovel down one of the yarding corridors into the, into the 18 acres and they're swinging the, the logs to
central yarding corridors to minimize the total number of, of corridors.
The benefit of that will be, you know, protecting as much of that young timber as possible.
Typically we tree length some of this. We had to buck a lot of it because we we wanted to get the logs totally suspended.
Several veterans timber fallers that worked for me, without them this couldn't have gotten done.
It takes all of Jay's 50 years of logging experience and
the cutting edge technology to pull off a job like, this to make it safe and efficient and profitable.
I'm honestly grateful that he took it on. I'm absolutely delighted.