I and some friends noted a bunch of mostly-bare spots in the mountains one day while flying from the San Francisco Bay Area to South Lake Tahoe for the proverbial “$100 hamburger”. Our pilot, who was quite familiar with the route, pointed them out and wondered what these bare spots are. None of us knew. They don’t appear to be camp sites – too irregular, and far too many spread out over a large area.
Anybody know what these are?
Some Google Earth views, at various magnifications:
So they do logging like that, laying out clearly-defined more-or-less polygonal patches like that and then clear-cutting those? I know nothing of logging practices, so I wouldn’t have figured that.
Yup, they log in small patches like this to avoid a lot of erosion. If you zoom in you’ll see that the patches have been replanted with small trees that will be logged off in a decade or so.
Yes, I did notice the new growth in those areas (that’s why I called the areas “mostly bare”), but I hadn’t made that connection in my mind. It hadn’t occurred to me that they actively replant those areas. I did notice a few fallen trees here and there and sporadic other debris in some spots.
In most of the Left Coast states logging companies are required to replant, which helps stabilize the denuded areas so that’s good but they tend to just replant log trees (in Oregon it’s almost always Douglas fir) for eventual harvest, which reduces the biodiversity, food sources and disease resistance of the “forests” they create. It’s more accurate to just think of them as lumber farms because that’s exactly what they are.
I would hope that the first thing they do is seed the area with some kind of grass that will sprout quickly and cover the whole area to prevent erosion. Isn’t that what they do in burn areas after fires?
Think of it like crop rotation. In the Bad Old Days the logging companies would clear cut every square meter they could. But they realized (with some help from environmental groups) that doing so had a huge negative impact on wildlife (which pissed off the hunters, of which they are legion), negative impact on water systems, and of course didn’t leave any trees for next year, or the year after. By selectively thinning some areas and only clear cutting a few small areas, sustainable harvests were able to be created. Of course, replanting is necessary too.
And re: seeding. No, they don’t plant grass or anything similar. Brush and other natural ground cover will grow pretty thick within a year or so, and of course the logging companies replant trees within the clear cut areas. They plant the saplings thick, far too thick to mature into a forest, and then go back in a few years later when the trees are xmas tree sized and thin them out, leaving the strongest to fully mature. 15-20 years later, those areas will be ready for harvest again.
Nope. Not in Doug Fir-heavy national forests anyway. The burned timber is sometimes sold off but because harvesting that timber can further damage already fragile ecosystems, plus the very real danger of a fire not being completely out even months after a fire is “put out,” usually by Ma Nature, areas that have been burned are usually left alone for a year or two then maybe reseeded with saplings.
As a side note, one reason the areas are cleared rather than thinned — aside from the fact that the cut timber doesn’t have to be maneuvered around uncut trees to get it out — is that conifers in general and Doug firs in particular don’t grow well in shade. So if the seedlings were planted among existing timber they’d take an unacceptably long time to develop and may not grow properly.
Also note that the American loggers have pushed logging capacity to the maximum they can sustain - then complain that western Canada with its abundant forests is undercutting (sorry!) American producers. The USA regularly in violation of NAFTA and Free Trade agreements pretends it’s “dumping” and imposes tariffs. Since they are the 500-lb gorilla, there’s nothing Canada can do about it.
British Columbia, however, will display similar patterns showing the patchwork look of heavy logging.
Another reason for the clear-cut is that most logging is done with heavy equipment, so “thinning” is not easy. In clear-cut areas it’s easier for the big equipment to get to the logs, and more room to operate. Also, whether private land or government leases, the area to be logged is designated, so there’s no profit in leaving something behind. Modern economic mentality leaves no room for profits a few years down the road, so get it all now.
(IIRC correctly, it really takes about 25 to 30 years to get decent lumber out of a replanted area. I was cross country skiing once near Mt. Hood in a planted forest, and it looks weird that all the trees are the same size. The only more weird view was Mt. Saint Helen where the entire forest from the lookout is all exactly the same age, for some reason. At the time, from a distance the synchronous branch growth looked like continuous horizontal lines.)
There are some logging outfits that will selectively cut trees from a mature forest. Back when my grandfather was alive, he owned a patch of woods, and sold off trees in it (and also used it for hunting and other recreation, for family and friends). But I gather that that’s mostly small, local companies, not the big players.
For those interested here are tons of videos of this type of heavy equipment working. I got to watch them live when I was an environmental consultant a few years ago. This one shows the various pieces of equipment and explains what they do. It’s a long video, but many different things are shown in the one video. They are harvesting trees from private land, but the same equipment and basic process is used in commercial logging.
Some areas have laws and/or terrain types that doesn’t allow that type of harvesting, so yes you still see guys with a big tool belt and a chainsaw felling huge trees in the mountains. It’s interesting to watch both types of logging and compare the rate they harvest trees at.
Another reason this isn’t done is that agronomic grasses will often out-compete the tree and brush species and actually prevent them from establishing and growing for decades or more in some cases.
There are even small companies that selectively log using horse teams to further protect the existing forest but I get the impression they’re logging more for good furniture lumber than mass production building materials.
The logging companies also leave the stumps behind, it looks unsightly AF but the root systems anchor the ground until the brush can grow and the rotting stumps produce good compost for the new growth. This is similar to the naturally occurring “nurse trees” that fall then their topside branches become entire new trees, absorbing the old trunk–other saplings will take root in the bark of the old trunk too, sometimes leaving odd bowlegged trees behind as the only evidence that the nurse log was ever there.
Mt St Helen had an eruption in 1980. I was driving my aunt home to Corvallis Oregon from Idaho on I-80N, now I-84, the day it blew. Exciting times to say the least.
The Lahars & para-plastic flow leveled many many acres of land. It has been said that over 200 SQUARE MILES of wilderness was leveled. I kinda doubt that number, I suspect that number is a tad low.
For many reasons, almost none of the timber was harvested. Some of the logs floating on Spirit Lake were recovered about two years after the May 18, 1980 event.
That might explain why “The only more weird view was Mt. Saint Helen where the entire forest from the lookout is all exactly the same age, for some reason”. It is indeed all the same age, which has nothing to do with logging.
On another note, I worked with a small outfit, (three men), that used horses to pull logs from sites that were being selective logged. We waited for the snow to be deep enough to skid the logs out without gouging ruts in the ground. We did not even scuff up the duff.
…logging removes fire-adapted and in many cases fire-resistant native vegetation and instead brings into the forest easily ignitable invasive species such as cheatgrass and tumbleweeds…
This is from a page on the Camp Fire that took out the entire town of Paradise, California.
The documentary Bring Your Own Brigade (2021) brings out this surprising fact in graphic, and depressing, detail.
Current clear cut logging practices don’t necessarily protect from wildfires and can actually contribute to the speed and ferocity of these fires.
I’ve got a Mt. St. Helens(*) story too! It so happened that I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area then, and I went to a four-day conference in Seattle (about killer whales!) just a few weeks after Mt. St. Helens blew.
I took a commercial flight to get there. We flew almost right over the volcano, just a short distance off to one side. The pilot dipped his starboard wing so we could all look out, right into the crater. It was still smoking.
The terrain was all a uniform gray as far as one could see. The trees were all over the ground, like piles of Pick-Up Sticks. I imagined that Harry R. Truman, the mountain man who refused to evacuate, was also one of the Pick-Up Sticks under all that ash.
(*) Mt. St. Helens, not to be confused with Mt. St. Helena, an extinct volcano at the north end of Napa Valley, just a hour drive north of San Francisco. It has a trail going up to the top, and a flat area at the top with benches and picnic tables.