Local Tour

The Columbia County Small Woodland Tour happened to be just up Timber Road a few miles from us.

The Courter’s have owned property in Columbia County for nearly 80 years, this tract of land is managed under the sustainable forestry standards of the American Tree Farm System.

The tour we highlighted the history of the property (how they got started  with timber), the importance of knowing your own property boundaries (how they learned the hard way from improperly placed boundary lines), road construction (understanding the ridges and valleys of a property), thinning strategies (looking at the long term), planning for desired species (avoiding too much competition), reforestation challenges with wildlife interference (elk, elk, elk), riparian protection (laws and best practices) and reducing forest fuels (cleaning up after harvest).

This property is an active logging site and a thinning job was in progress as well as small clearings  (harvest cuts) where sick or damaged trees were found as the thinning was in progress.

Thinning a stand is not a one time deal. Managed forests like this can be thinned several times during the growth of the trees creating more crown space for the remaining trees to thrive and grow to their maximum height and girth. This tour showed how the owners are looking forward to harvesting tall poles from the forest.

The tour was partially by bus and partially by walking. It was a beautiful day and because the Courter’s wanted accessibility to the acreage by building exceptional roads through the forest, it was pleasant walking along the hauling roads.

This acreage is similar to ours in that both the Nehalem River and a creek flow through the property.

The riparian plantings, especially the cedar, are disturbed by what could possibly be the same elk that bother the heck out of our grass fields and seedlings.

The Courter’s use mesh cages/sleeves to protect the cedars just like we do but they use a bigger size, 4 feet tall instead of 3 and 6 inches in diameter instead of the 4 that we use. The rational is that it will be easier to keep lifting the taller and bigger around mesh sleeves as the seedlings grow. There were many, many disturbed, moved, tipped over and mangled sleeves strewn about since the elk had made an appearance just before the tour crowd showed up.