When we moved to the woods in 2020, we knew that the forest had been treated with a benign, but gentle neglect. Overall, it wasn’t bad, but it needed some attention. It was logged in the 70’s and 80’s to build the home on the property and allowed to grow on it’s own since then. We want a healthy and nice looking property for ourselves and for the next residents. To promote forest health, Idaho offers tax incentives for healthy forest management, and we decided to embark on a sanitation harvest as recommended by the local forester. A sanitation harvest is prescribed to remove overgrown trees, sick trees and trees that just needed to be thinned out. This turned out to be a bigger project than we expected, but in the end, the result was great. We met some amazing folks who really helped us out, and we ended up selling enough logs to cover the costs of all the work we did.
The toughest part, emotionally, was removing essentially all of the fir trees. They were all sick, and because they have value while living, it made sense to remove them now, before they died and became a falling and fire hazard.
We’ve added links to our contemporaneous posts on Instagram, because I’m too lazy to do them over again. Questions are certainly welcome. We still have a bit of clean up work to complete in the spring of 2023, but for now, we are done cutting trees.
Below is a short video of Scottie, dropping a nice cedar. It’s base was in a low lying area that is periodically inundated, and we needed to remove it while he was here.
Below is an aerial shot of Brett and his amazing Feller-Buncher. This > $500,000 machine makes quick, neat and efficient work of dropping 100 foot trees and stacking them for the skidder. He cut most of the trees, very selectively, in just over a day. They warned me I’d want to clear my calendar to watch, and they were right, it was amazing to see this thing in motion. Its an effective method for selective harvesting. The huge, spinning blade cuts a 24″ tree trunk in seconds, grabs the trunk and lays it down in a neat pile.
Here is Will in the skidder, skidding logs on skid trails. This machine is really powerful and it pulls really heavy loads through the woods, back to the logging deck where cutting and delimbing occur. The goal here was to drag the trees across limited areas to minimize the damage.
This delimber strips branches and cuts the logs to length. The mills demand healthy logs at 8’3″, 16’6″ or 33′ and we ended up with some of each. The branches and unhealthy stuff was piled for future use in either burn piles, firewood or poles.
Craig showed up in his self-loading log truck to haul the finished product to one of a couple of local mills, where the logs were scaled (measured, graded and valued) and made into lumber for your next home!
At the end of the project, we had to clean everything up. Our options were limited. We couldn’t do nothing, that would have left a mess and fire hazard. We could grind it all up with a forestry mulcher or burn it. In any case, the wood would be broken down, either quickly or slowly. We got two bids for grinding, and not only were they expensive, but they really needed to burn a lot of fuel. So, we let the piles dry for a couple of months, and on the first big, wet day, we set them off. It was a serious sight to behold. The biggest pile was so hot we couldn’t get near it.
Ash pile, two days after the burn was ignited
Pile today, 75 days after ignition: No wonder forest fires take so long to extinguish!
This page is a work in Progress. I’ll make edits as needed to clean it up. For now, the goal was to get it up and running.
Pack River Woods 
Leave a comment