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Torbjörn Johnsen 1 year, 6 months ago.
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Hi there,
This is my first question for the group. I am Head Groomer for a cross country ski club here and a former logger on the BC coast from the lower mainland to Haida Gwaii/Queen Charlotte Islands. Our area that we use is part of the ‘Community Forest’ that our town was able to get in a program the provincial government was running a few years back. There is a board comprised of the elected town officials and they hired a planner and an RPF to come up with a plan to manage this area. Well part of the plan was to do a commercial thinning of the area which is still taking place and at first they were piling the debris to be burnt and then decided to chip it and sell it to the local pellet mill that has started up which makes sense. So we have had a fair amount of blowdown since this CT program started – mainly balsam and hemlock and the powers to be don’t seem to be much interested in utilizing this downed timber which ranges in size from 30cm – 70 cm. diameter and from 7m to 20 m high if standing. My question to the group is can these trees be stood back up, guylined until they are windfirm? A lot of them seem to still be alive with still green branches. I remember several years ago seeing a Youtube video of a special crew in Sweden that was going around and doing just that but I haven’t been able to find it on the Youtube site so maybe it was taken off! Thank you for allowing me to join this site too…
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Hi Dean! Nice to see you here at Forestry.com! I understand what you’re looking for but I can’t remember I have ever seen someone doing that. To re-errect windthrown trees. But it might be possible if the trees are not to big and if you do it short time after it has fallen. And probably it must bee a tree that have still gave some kind of soil contact with roots via a “hinge”. But to do this with big and mature trees in a large scale might not be feasible. I will look trough what I can find here and will be back if there is something useful./tbj.
thanks so much Tobjorn, I am sorry I cannot spell your name right with this keyboard, it is an old ipad and can’t be updated…much like me my wife says….anyways, I am not sure if I could post pictures to this site so I could show you the blowdown and trails I am referring to and the size of the timber. I realize if the roots come completely out the tree would be not be saveable but a lot of the trees I saw still had half the roots in the ground. I also remember on the video I was watching of Swedish logging practices they were interviewing a guy who owned/operated a feller/processer with a GPS on it and he got his orders of where and how much to,cut in the morning and he was paid every day at the end of shift because the computer logged all data…very cool machine…they also showed the inside of a sawmill and it was soooooo clean compared to,ours here and at lunch the guys went down the street to the local inn and had lunch and a beer…that would/could never happen here…we aren’t civilized enough for that….whenever I hear people complaining about the state of our forests over here I always tell them to bring in the Swedes to run our forests and we will finally become sustaiainable…its all cut and run here with as little effort or spending on the future as possible…sorry for the tirade but I love the forest and logging but not happy with the big companies at all…
I’ts an easy life to be a forester in Sweden. Only two softwood spices and very little hardwoods. But the landscape is a little bit more boring compare with your hardwoods. And you are better in taking care of the hardwoods over there. If you are interested, you can find a lot of videos at our Youtube channel: youtube.com/skogsforum
Some of the videos has subtitles in English. Most of them from Sweden but also a video from an American white pine sawmill in Maine
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