It was absolutely a marvelous place to grow up. Mostly my sister and I together
exploring the woods all around here because we have about 150 acres.
We would just go walking along the river or along the creek and the beaver ponds and it was really idyllic.
Probably about five years ago they started to die. Trees are thinning up there.
Look at that, you can see the tops dying. And the tops were dying.
And this was right around, shortly before the drought, where the drought got really bad.
I received a phone call from Suzanne McAllister in the fall of 2018 I want to say, and she, like a lot of folks up here
in the McKenzie River had some concerns about some die-off in their Douglas-fir. So a lot of mortality.
We've seen a lot of it with respect to the drought.
The main motivation was to keep the house safe, keep my mom safe, and to allow the forest to grow up
without endangering the highway or the house or my mom or anybody walking underneath any of the dying, dead trees.
Of course you have the McKenzie River, which is a large, large Type F stream, fish-bearing stream,
which has a 100-foot riparian management area and live conifer retention, which is pretty
pretty challenging to obtain and so when you talk about potentially having a harvest within that
you know, that's something we're obviously very interested in taking a look at.
We had a lot of confidence in Greg Johnson from the start. When we asked him "How would you do this?"
He said "I would..." you know, he would explain and it was clear he had a plan.
From the very beginning he could imagine how he would do this.
I told her that they weren't all going to save
but wed' do the best we can to save as many as we can.
When we first got this job I was thinking that my dad shouldn't, shouldn't take the job.
It seemed like a really difficult job to do with the power lines and the road and the river and just all the different things that came along with the job.
Well, you know, there's a lot of dangerous, hairy trees that had to be pulled over and pulled or pushed.
There was a bunch of trees with dead tops and just a bunch of trees that looked rotten
or like they might fall over if you looked at them wrong.
Most of the trees you had to work with the machine on it because there was no way you could get enough wedges to pound them over
because they were leaning so hard and so rotten. We were using a link belt a log loader and
it pretty much does all the loading for the trucks and stuff and brush piling and can do most
of what you need to do, especially on these smaller jobs like this.
The log loader comes and either grabs a tree like by swinging the grapples up or you come behind it and pull back on it like
towards you and the fallers down here oh or get behind it if it's possible but on this job is the
river was right there and so that made everything quite a bit more difficult.
Even though it was me and my dad out here most of the time that we couldn't have done it without Albert Demaris, a really great cutter.
The Douglas-firs are dying. What's coming up in the understory is the incense cedar.
The landowner didn't want to just reforest with Douglas-fir
and we didn't want them to reforest with Douglas-fir. It was obvious that they were
the site conditions -- floodplain -- those trees weren't doing very well. So we wanted to put something back in
that was more diverse but wanted to take advantage of the great seedling source of these cedars.
He had to dance around those trees, to protect those trees while felling the others.
And while he skid the logs, make sure he wasn't hitting the butts of it and damaging the trees.
The family wanted us to keep all the little tiny cedar trees alive, on top of trying to miss
all the houses and stuff, we had to miss these little tiny cedar trees and try to keep them alive.
They obviously love the, the forest. I've seen other people work where they just drive over anything.
And he was always careful to try to leave a red huckleberry if he could, or you know,
a hazelnut so that they could come back.
Yeah, we had to leave some wildlife trees just for the wildlife
and to make sure the habitat was preserved for all these animals out here. We left upwards of about a dozen of them.
We were and we are still very happy with the way that Greg Johnson did the work.
We really pride ourselves in doing good work. We try to
do and listen to the landowner but also if there's some things that they just don't know
we'll come in and we'll talk to them and tell them like, "Oh, hey, this would work a lot better."
And usually when they decide with us they're so grateful they did.
The time and effort he put into this was just A-plus. It was a great job.
This is what we were aiming for and they helped us achieve it.
We would not have been able to do it without them.
We did what they wanted us to do.