Monday started off right with Jamie, Jace and I driving up Norton Road. This is where Bear lives. He is a large Great Pyrenees dog that runs and barks at trucks. His name is Bear and is always fun to drive by and take pictures of.
Anthony Cafferata
After the encounter, we continued up to the unit to survey the streams in the Sam Norton unit. We surveyed a total of six streams in this unit, which took the whole day. We did not see Bear on the way back to the office, but we were looking for him.
Tuesday I was with Jace “check cruising” the West Thiel unit outside of Newport. This unit had several problems with it, which is why the whole crew has been involved. This was the first time Jace and I had been there so we were checking plots that had been done by Caroline and Daniel. We were looking for correct tree count, diameter and defect measurements. While we were out there, Jace and I found two cow elk skulls and an interesting looking conk mushroom growing out of a stump.
Western varnished conk
Wednesday through Friday I worked with Gus. We got to revisit the bridge I mentioned last week and finish up that project. We brought out four new deck boards and used an impact driver to screw them into the bridge to the best of our abilities. We had to reuse two boards that were taken off last week to fill in the remaining gaps. We had a battery crisis with our impact driver and had to briefly return on Thursday to finish screwing in bolts to finish up the whole project.
After that, Gus and I drove to the North Fork Alsea tree farm to start a cruise in a yarder thinning unit. We were skeptical at first because when “yarder” is in the name, we know it is bound to be steep. We got there and our fears were realized when we were looking straight down on this unit. Thankfully, most of the plots weren’t too bad. The trees were spaced well and getting the measurements wasn’t too difficult. What was bad was the climb back out, knowing that we had only completed half of the plots and needed to go back the next day (Friday) and clamber back down and then all the way out again.
On Friday, we were slipping and sliding all the way down and when we reached the bottom, we saw that the map had three plots outside the thinned area. This new area hadn’t been thinned because it was across a steep draw and there were lots of downed trees due to storm damage. Gus and I had to navigate all this on the steep terrain only to have maybe three trees in our plots because the others had fallen over.
Gus sliding down the steep slope.
Finally, when we finished the last plot, Gus pointed out that we didn’t even find a shed for our troubles. I like to think that enjoying our lunch outside looking out was reward enough.
Overall, a fun and exciting week at Starker Forests comes to an end ready and eager to see what the next holds in store.
— Anthony Cafferata