The last month has been busy for the Arcata BLM forestry department (comprised mainly of the resident forester and his minion, me). After my mentor paved the way for months (by obtaining funding, getting the right forms to the right people, entertaining bids from contractors, and gaining public support), we have been bouncing around to evaluate the progress of 3 projects unfolding at the same time.
Common to all projects is the need for humans to (within the project boundaries) temporarily triumph over nature’s momentum, nudging ecosystems back onto the track from which human settlement derailed them. I have been awed by the range of methods humans have devised to make their mark on the landscape. I’ll focus on 2 of the projects here: thinning 140 acres of an overgrown Tanoak stand in the path of the spreading Sudden Oak Death pathogen, and restoring 18 acres of historic prairie that is well on the way to becoming a stand of towering Douglas Firs.
On the 140-acre thinning, the method employed was a 29-person hand crew. Steep slopes and specific contract conditions (20 foot leave tree spacing) precluded the use of machinery. These 29 guys (half with chainsaws, half piling the cut trees into burn piles) descended upon the forest with such fervor as I have never seen. Practically running from tree to tree, pile to pile, they worked with the utmost speed as safety would permit. Trees were falling in all directions and the piling crew was throwing wood everywhere, leaving thousands of tidy piles that will ideally be burned. They made me feel lazy in comparison to all the manual labor I’ve ever done in my life.
Before thinning.
See the difference?
On the 18-acre prairie restoration, nearly all of the trees are going. While some delicacy is needed around the majestic Black and White Oaks that were nearly shaded out by Douglas Fir, cutting and extracting this forest requires heavy machinery. Let me introduce you to the danglehead processor, a 7,000 pound attachment for an excavator that: 1) grabs a tree, 2) cuts the tree, 3) lowers the tree to the ground, 4) slides up and down the span of the tree to knock off branches, 5) measures diameter, and 6) cuts the tree into perfect lengths for the sawmill and biomass electric plant. The danglehead can process 3 trees per minute.
This thing eats trees.
During free time, last night I sat in the tops of skeleton Sitka Spruce and Lodgepole Pine. How was it possible? I was walking on the BLM-managed Ma-le’l Dunes along the Pacific Ocean. The active dunes swallow this unique duo of conifers, leaving 2-foot-diameter trunks rooted in groundwater 20 feet below with only a handful of desperate knee-height needles that still manage to produce cones.
Let your mind be like a braided river’s channels, flowing from bank to bank. But when you focus, be like the Sun’s brilliant point of light as it’s about to melt into the horizon. And never be afraid to use metaphors that have certainly been used before!