Never fell timber for a living, biggest trees I've cut are four to five feet on the butt, I can only think of one that I had to block out because I couldn't reach from both sides with a 32" bar. I spent several years surveying on the Olympic peninsula though and marked some jobs with trees like that on them. And some absolutely humongous swelled butted cedars. Quite a bit of big wood over there still, but it is pretty much all National Forest and nobody gets much chance to work in it. Had a couple friends and a couple uncles that were fallers and specialized in cutting big wood. They broke in back when it was more common and knew how to handle the big stuff, both for your safety and safety of the tree. Fall one of those big ones wrong and you are going to shatter it.

Ever use a tree jack Tramp? Mention one to most guys nowadays and they don't have a clue what you're talking about.

Bjarne knows what he's doing. Coastal BC and SE Alaska are one in the same for the most part. They just have roads to the rest of the world, we don't

Yeah, one of those pictures has my silvey backpack set in it, it's the same one I'm standing in front of on my mugshot. Was a hard leaner over the ocean buffer zone, I was going to leave it standing rather than fight it like I did. But the logger threw a fit, so I packed jacks out on a Sunday and laid it into the unit for them...I was a little salty about it, so I bucked a 40' 10" butt log knowing they were gonna struggle and cuss and fight moving a 40 foot log that stood over 8' in diameter lol

Bjarne and others get helicoptered in sometimes. Said they may stay for 10 days to 2 weeks at a time in camp.

Native corporation and and AK state lands of southeast AK are about the only places in the USA where old growth forest is still being cut in a noticeable way, such as looking at landscape scale satellite imagery.. Almost everywhere else, at least on public land, what remains of old growth (generally stated as 200 years or older) is off limits, at least for the big conifers.

And the softwoods are the main ingredient to US timber industry (and Canada as well). About 70% of wood products in the country are softwood-based, with hardwoods making up north of 30%. The US South is the biggest forestry region by area cut every year and by the mid-1990s surpassed the Pac NW in volume of wood removed per year as well. I haven' looked at super recent stats, but sometime after 2000, the US South was producing about 15% of the global base output for wood-based products.

Yeah Canadians are spoiled. In SE you stay in camp until you're divorced. My longest run without going into town was 10 months

I'm not down there right now, but my uncle is running a couple cutting crews in the NF right now cutting old growth. Forest service has realized that the Tongass has reached the end of its life cycle, it's going to blow down or rot where it stands unless it gets cut and processed like yesterday

I said I'd throw in some wildfire pictures too. These are predominantly in the L48, most of my wildfire calls come from WA, OR, and CA.

Good to hear that some common sense in now in play for the Tongass. What I always find rather head scratching when I read and deal with various policies is that nature has a vote in how things go down, ranging from trees to critters. Such non-humans don't listen or live by rules and laws written on paper...

My dad with big yellow birch in the Adirondacks
Yellow birch
Yellow birch veneer
My son with a couple big ones
We cut quite a bit of timber in the Adirondacks years ago. My dad was a logging contractor. I think his longest road was 18 miles in.

Man those are some big trees.Do they replant trees after your done or are their plenty of pinecone seeds that take off once your done?

It reseeds on its own. There's also some undergrowth left behind in the tower units (less ground/brush disturbance than putting a machine in the brush) where it's practical to leave some shorter/smaller trees standing that won't affect the process of stringing haywire for the next skyline setting, or get rubbed/cut off by moving lines and potentially kill a rigging hand. In mechanical units we leave ALL the small diameter stuff, and any snags under 40' tall, a guy in a 100,000 pound log loader has the technology to deal with that stuff if it's in his way

Big timber

great pic, thanks for sharing ,I still enjoy cutting trees, of course nothing that big

Those are some big trees, here the biggest I’ve seen is 6 to 7 feet cottonwood and maples, the maples are almost always rotten in the middle with only about 2 inches holding the tree up, it’s amazing how they can stand with so little wood left.

As my Grandson would say "I'm chocking hookers on the mountainside " . Put some rocks in the new guys lunch box ! Be careful

No doubt they bucked that log. Not likely they were going to load that in one piece. Once the cutters left us a second cut that was 13' 6" x 42' There was good cause though as it was a dangerous lay to buck. With a block purchase and a parbuckle we got it up onto a bench and bucked it in half. Still had to load them with the yarder.

Humptulips they wrapped a b strap around one end and had a D8 help the shovel along on the other end. It got rolled onto a lowboy

Impressive

I don't think I could cut anything that size

I cut a water oak up into blocks today that probably would be a small limb on some of those big trees