A Bear In There

Since our hillside is very steep, logging cannot take place during the wet season because the dozer simply cannot get up and down the skid roads. We conclude our logging season, which was more just a cleaning up season this year from all of last winters damage, when the rains begin.

The plan was to be finished logging with the last log truck load that went out last week. Mike took the dozer up the hill to get one last turn of logs for the load. He moved across the hillside from where we had been cleaning up and found a patch of trees that had significant scarring from a bear or two or three.

In this picture, the dark spot about 10 feet up the tree shows where a bear had ripped a hole through the bark, past the cambium (where the life-blood of the tree flows and what the bears are after) and into the wood. This example has already scarred over so this gouge is most likely happened a couple of years ago.

Since so many trees in this area looked dead or near death from the bear girdling, and the rain was tentatively holding off for a few more days, the decision was made to clean up this patch and harvest one more log truck load this year.

Leaving these trees in the woods could lead to more fire danger in the form of dry fuel and several of the trees showed possible root rot that can spread from tree to tree through the root systems. It was good to get these out of the forest even though most of them became firewood instead of logs from the extensive damage to the trees.