A Walk Through A Neighbors Woods

A few weeks ago, I missed an opportunity to attend a Washington County Small Woodland Event because we had been intensely engaged in the final stages of hay season and could not break away from the farm. This weekend, I had a chance to take a walking tour on a forest of one of our members of the Columbia County Small Woodland Association that was located closer to the Columbia River.

It was a good afternoon for a walk in the forest, it was one of those days when heavy morning cloud cover stubbornly refused to burn off until after 3 pm leaving the day mild and comfortable for outside activates without needing to look for shade or and extra jacket

We walked the paths of the forest and observed a stand of fir trees that were about 35 years old, they were thickly planted at about 350 trees per acre and had very few trees that did not survive. Over the years, the owners had thinned out the damaged or sick trees. The forest floor have a good layer of green foliage showing that sunlight is working its way through the canopy but the trees are still too thick to grow effectively.

The question about thinning is rather sticky at this stage of growth. The thinning could open up the stand to grow quicker, but could also disturb those trees that are to remain, giving them a shock to their system with disturbed soil or damage as other trees are felled and removed, or opening up the forest to too much sunlight and blistering the remaining trees, or opening up the stand for wind/snow damage from trees that are not used to the fending for themselves. The owners of this property have opted for only manual removal of sick, damaged or dying trees as they naturally occur and leaving the stand to grow for the next 35 to 40 years before harvesting the acreage and replanting the entire stand with mixed species.

Another area of the forest was two plots that had planted alder stands and highlighted different methods of grooming the trees when young. The first stand was left to grow undisturbed after the initial planting about 15 to 20 years ago.

The understory of this stand is nearly as tall as the alder trees with very thick blackberry vines, heavy grasses, elderberries and brush. The alder trees have struggled to grow above the underbrush line up until the last couple of years. Now the alder will begin vigorous growth and begin to choke out all the lower level vegetation.

The other stand that was a little farther down the canyon had been planted at the same time. This stand had been groomed as it was growing by manual slashing of unwanted vegetation. Manual slashing meant a crew of people went in with small saws and cut away those competing understory vines and brush when the trees were only 4 to 8 years old. The understory is much less in volume and the invasive blackberry vines are not present because the canopy has filled in enough to choke out any remaining vines.

The manual labor was expensive and time consuming but this stand of alder is nearly twice as tall as the undisturbed plot with about twice the volume of wood. The stand is open and easy to see if an area has growing issues that need attention.

We also got to see some of the heavy equipment this woods family uses for their commercial logging operation including a behemoth chipper. I was so in awe of this equipment I completely forgot to grab a picture. The size is that of a semi truck and trailer with the capacity to chip or shred wood into small shavings from unusable logs, split stumps and trash slash.

The shavings are loaded into semi trucks via a conveyor belt and the full truck can haul the shavings to a local pulp mill to be used as hog fuel. Hog fuel is scrap wood to make power for the mill to make pulp for paper products. This commercial side to the forest, cleans up after the logs have been hauled away leaving the area without slash piles that would need to decompose naturally in the woods (taking years or decades) or burning which causes more labor and danger. The logging jobs are left without slash and ready for the replanting tasks to begin.