From the Fields - Zane Peterson

By Zane Peterson, Shasta County forester 

We are currently salvage logging in the northern part of the state in Plumas, Lassen and Shasta counties. This year we haven’t experienced as big of wildfires. During the last few years, most of the areas that we work in have burned. The fact that we got a little break from fires this year is definitely encouraging. We’re not out of the woods yet with fire season, but we hope that it stays off and we can make it through this year without burning trees up.

The last two years have been very heavily intense on salvage logging and getting the burnt trees removed and to the sawmills. It’s been very challenging. A lot of those fires are getting cleaned up on private land. We’re getting baby trees planted, and they’re growing again, so that’s encouraging to see some new life in a black burn scar.

We’re cutting the trees with feller bunchers. It’s a machine that can cut a tree off and place it where we want it to go. Then we grab them with grapple skidders and drag them to the landing, a centralized location. At that point, we process them to length with a machine we call the processor. It strips all the limbs off and cuts them to a desired length for the sawmill. Then we load them onto log trucks.

The market is pretty soft for raw logs right now because of the glut of burned material on the market. That’s one reason we’re encouraged that we didn’t burn up a lot of acres this year. The market might come back up, and there might be some opportunity to sell some logs.

Federal lands are still behind (on salvage logging) and not quite getting things done as quick as they need to. It’s because of NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act). Their process to be able to harvest trees is more strenuous than the process to harvest trees on private land in an emergency situation in California.