After the original logging about 75-100 years ago, the stumps sprouted. In the old days, they didn’t cut the trees low to the ground, so the sprouts shot out of the side of the old stumps. They grow away from each other seeking light, leaning out from the stump and then curving upward in a race to the sky. Many were weak, thin, and perilously unbalanced, bending over like a fishing rod under load. There were some that take "S" bends under their own weight, 120' tall, 10" in diameter (dbh).

When the wind blows, these spindly trees sway large distances at the top. They slap into each other. Shearing and collision often breaks off branches on adjacent sides between trees while a lack of light starves those pointed toward the middle of the cluster. The branches they retain are either at the very top or directed away from the center of the original tree in the same direction in which they lean. In one case, there are over 12 trees exceeding 100 feet in height within a 10-foot diameter circle perched over a minor cliff. It’s a lot of leverage against a steep slope of loose fluff on hard sandstone.

As the stump rots, the trees have less support on the tension side of their common base. This unbalanced and decaying support system combines with the unbalanced load condition supplied by the branches on the outside of the group. When they fall down they can crunch some nice trees on the way, if they make it to the ground. Some were standing, quite dead, with all their branches. Others were broken, their tops sheared off from the fall of larger trees in the past. A few were hanging in the air, caught in the branches of the living like some sort of arboreal Pieta. These latter, structurally tenuous and unpredictable tangles are charmingly known as "widow makers."

The more successful sprouts were packed so tightly that they were starting to force together in clusters. The right thing to do was to thin them.

Once you are there, it still takes a long time to decide what to do. Cutting trees is irrevocable. There are an awful lot of factors involved, but some of the decisions are easy:

Step 1: If it was an old stump, cut it to the dirt-line, parallel to the slope.

This wasted saw chains but it did make the area a safer place in which to work. The downside was that many of these old stumps, some only ten to twelve inches across, callused over, rotting, and "dead" for over fifty years, sprouted new shoots! The tree is an incredible survivor.

Photo 4 - Upper Stand After Logging This was about five years after the first job. Note the crown sprout.

Step 2: If it was dead and didn’t have anything living in it, cut it down.

None of these were "snags" worthy of habitation. Cutting them was relatively easy. It was getting them down that was a pain. When redwoods are dead and dry, they are light and stiff and often hang up in the dead lower branches of other trees. The process got easier as those hanging matches broke off when felling the others. Most were rotting and the parts that were useless were chopped up and laid across the slope where they were. Since they were dry, they were easy to move.

Step 3: If it was extremely sickly, cut it down.

These weren’t so light to move. They had to be carried out in pieces or dragged out over a high-lead block.

Step 4: So, deal with the widow-makers.

These were a real joy to take apart. Some of them were hung up in branches far from support. Some are "tied" onto another tree by poison oak or honeysuckle (thank God it wasn’t Ivy). If you are lucky, the butt of the log is on the ground and you can cut them up by taking out chunks from the bottom. Each time you take out a chunk, the butt comes down and hits the dirt closer under the point from which the tree is hanging. Then (again, if you are lucky) it flops back the other way toward the cringing woodsman sporting a hard hat.

What happens if you are not lucky? They flip up into the air, hanging in the arms of their relatives. Then the fun starts. First climb one of their buddies and toss out a rope to grab the beastie or cut and pull on the poison oak and try to shake it out. Sometimes you get to go out on a limb (the one that is loaded with your victim). Here is where that nerd climbing experience as a youth came in. You just part whatever you can safely reach until it comes down. There is risk, and then there is stupidity. It sure would be easier, safer, and cleaner with machinery. But then, if you can’t afford that; it’s a commercial job and then it’s back to the permit and the 35 MBF. Most people don’t have an extra $35K lying around as gardening money.

By that time, three to five percent of the wood was down or about one third of the trees by count. Count the rings. One was 90 years old and seven inches in diameter, bark and all. About two thirds of these were rotten up the middle. Some folks say that this was due to a fire right after it was last logged, but there was no charring and the internal grain structure was symmetrical. These trees were simply cut up on the forest floor, and laid across the slope to slow the rainwater down and build some topsoil. Those that were sound were carried out in 10' pieces, maybe to become fence posts. It was steep.

Now the visibility was good enough to study the situation. The plan was to retain the "best" trees. The criteria were size, verticality, slope, straightness, branch structure, root support, and growing space. The plan included a multi-phase approach. Some were left for the purpose of protecting good trees from excessive light so that they would not grow too fast or sprout new branches. Others were left to shade the ground until their betters needed the space. One had a triple-leader crotch at the top that had an owl’s nest. A few juveniles had promise in terms of location and shape. There was one horrid little 20-foot twig with a nest swinging around on top in the middle of a particularly useful opening that couldn’t be hit with anything else during the entire process. The nest came down by itself three years later.

The trick was to remove the less desirable trees in a manner that minimized injury to the keepers. This often involves putting on spikes and a cable-belt, climbing 80 to 100 feet up on one of these weak spindly beasts, and cutting the top off in a way that is safest for the other trees. They say that topping it higher is safer. They say that when they are standing on the ground. You see, there is this little matter of Newton’s Third Law. When the top starts to fall, its center of mass shifts to one side. The trunk loads up like a big leaf spring (pun intended), whips back, and tosses off the top with the perpetrator waving around like a flag. The Doppler-shifted warble of miscellaneous expletives echoes through the forest. Then you clamber down (shaking) and get out the trusty 30" skip tooth 044 felling saw and drop the trunk where you can get it out and not hurt anything. Often that process involves pulling it over center (it’s an extra grand for a hydraulic timberjack), and bless you if you don’t get crushed by the falling log and can keep it from sliding back down the hill. Rather than harm a good tree, at times you drop it in such a way that you know it will shatter. For your trouble and personal risk you often get this skinny often kinked log, with lots of knots and often a… rotten core. It really gives you a warm feeling about the climb you just made and gets you all jacked up for swinging around on top of the next one!

Those "next ones" are usually bigger. It takes clearing the junky trees out of the understory to see the others well enough to make choices. There is also more room to drop them without getting them hung up or crunching into anything you want not to injure. These are usually either unbalanced, within five to ten feet of a larger, straighter competing relative, or with severe kinks at higher levels. Some lost their central leader and elected a branch for the job. Some of are infected with rot at the junction of the kink. Some tops are doubled, though less often than with the firs. It really makes you think while you watch the flexure in the top section hinging at that, maybe, rotten kink, especially if you are climbing on one.

Photo 5 - Logging Slash; (immediately after the job) not exactly a fire hazard, is it? This material will slow runoff, soil erosion, and improve percolation. On the other hand, it slows groundcover regeneration. Trade-offs are a fact.

What to do about the slash? What slash? These trees had been so crowded, there were very few major branches. Most of was chopped up on the forest floor. Five years later you can’t see it. Most of the tops fell outside of the stand onto the ridges as the tree were felled uphill, out of the draw. That fraction was dragged into piles for burning. It was harder than it sounds.

The purpose for this work was not to get logs; it was to improve the forest. There was no plan to use the wood. Now that the logs were on the ground, before they were bucked off into lengths, the next job was to come up with a legal set of uses. You can’t sell the logs, not even in trade for labor. The State thinks that is illegal. One could get a permit and then sell the logs, but then you are back to the timber tax, the forester, the County officials looking for fine-money, and the horde of consultants to get the permit. Vegetable garden retaining walls appeared to be the only use.

Bring in the local guy with the band-saw mill, and wouldn’t you know, the lumber yield off lousy logs is… well, lousy. There isn’t too much that is useful and a lot of it is in oddball sizes. The slab cuts taken off the log to square it have been spread around the property across slopes for retaining gopher tailings and organic duff to produce better topsoil. (It really works.) Clear, fine-grained, 3" x 8" redwood; for two-foot retaining walls? What a waste! It could have been furniture or siding. Most of the stuff ended up given away before it rotted. Some of it did. Some of it is baking in the sun. You can’t barter, or you are back to the permit. I gave a third of it away.

It’s sick. Somebody else logged a forest, and probably with a great deal less care, to make up for material that could have covered the cost of doing an even better job. There were things I did that were less than optimal because there was no way to cover the cost for doing it the best way; i.e., with heavy equipment to pull the logs over and out in the least destructive fashion. There are things that can be done with heavy equipment at lower environmental impact that you just can’t do alone.

By the time you do get done with all of this, the cost of the wood nears what you would pay at the lumberyard. Sometimes it is more. Now guess what happens. The sprouts off the cut stumps sprout too! It’s not like it wasn’t expected. Consultations with numerous authorities all say, "Cut them down and keep them down. Starve the stump until it quits." I don’t think they do quit. Redwood isn’t a quitter; it’s a competitor, and a successful one at that.

Fire could be one of nature’s ways of sprout control and tree selection. It might also provide a chance for something else besides redwood to grow by removing some of the duff, exposing soil, raising the pH, adding usable mineral salts and oxides, and scarifying some of the seed bank. Of course we don’t really know what nature’s way is because nature never cut a tree clean to the ground with a chainsaw. Aboriginal Americans and lightning have been lighting fires over many times the lifetime of a redwood tree. We thus have little idea what the distributions of flora were before then.

Perhaps there might be unsuspected adverse consequences to this kind of forestry? People get all worried that thinning these trees on steep slopes can cause landslides. Some activists worry that, after logging the roots will die back and let the soil mass loose from the slope. It’s a theory. It’s wrong too. In fact, careful logging of a second growth redwood forest may help to prevent landslides. Here is an example from our property that is the story behind the stump on the cover of the book (see photos):

About 100 years ago, white guys with steel tools came along and whacked them both. Another landslide buried the stumps and the roots sprouted 31 trees in a 20-foot diameter circle, a third were dead, 16 were over 6" dbh, nine over 20" dbh. (See Photo 1) There were three to five trees in an arc in the process of joining at the bottom, undercut by a drainage channel through the alluvial substrate. It was an impending wall of wood with half a foundation (at left).

Photo 6 - Looking Up from the Center of the Cluster After Logging. Note the distribution of foliage due to phototropism and collisions. They are now sprouting new branches. The tree we bent out of the way is at the top

What did I do with the mess? I got some help from a friend whose family has been working these trees for fifty years. He needed a low-key practice job to help figure out if he had a career left after some serious back surgery. After I whacked out the runts, we set up to fell about a third of the larger trees. I climbed them and set the chokers. He pulled them back over center through the clump on a 300-foot-long, 5/8" high-lead cable over a snatch block in a fir that we used as a gin-pole (there was no winching or cat-skidding because all he had to do was back the loader down the ROAD). We dropped them all through a fifteen-foot gap between two trunks 40 and 60 feet away. One of those would have been snagged and broken by the ones we were felling through the gap, so I climbed it to where it was about five inches across (twice), set a rope, while Steve bent it about 25' out of the way.

Photo 5 - Root Wad, One could call it VLWD (Very Large Woody Debris). Is it a stump, or is it a tree?

We used the same equipment to yard out the logs. Then what to do with the material? I gave the logs to Steve. Sue me. Neither of us had any intention of financial benefit and it shows. He said that this was like working with his Dad again, and to me, it was an honor. Les Liebenberg was God’s gift to redwood in these parts. He died a bitter man for all the damage environmentalists are doing. Nobody around here knew and loved these trees, or risked his life to care for them, like Les did.

Where there were 31 trees, nine of them over 24", there are now six large trees, each about 10'-15' apart, with perfectly spaced tops. Unlike many coniferous trees, a redwood trunk puts out new branches in response to light and they will balance.

The next job was cleanup, bucking the slash into pieces, reworking the deer trail, setting small logs as water bars, cutting water bars, laying branches across the road, and scraping up some blackberry nodes to "pave" it. There is also the never-ending task of controlling weeds and sprouts.

It’s a lot of work. It might seem like a lot of rather aggressive action taken on the basis of speculation. How did I know about this history? How did I know how these trees ended up where they did and why did I think that the action I was taking had a good chance of preventing a problem?

I dug out that old stump and LEARNED the history while I was doing the job. When we sucked it out, I found the original log, from that original landslide still under the alluvium, dead, but still sound. I did something about it, because I knew that if I didn’t, it would burn to death. That is how I know what happened 250 years ago.

Photo 5 - Hillside Profile After Logging. The original tree likely sat in the pocket below the top stump. The lower stump is over 50" across. Removing it created our "corridor." There is a scarp above. The group in the back­ground has large trees on the outside overhanging a cliff. Same story, unless somebody does something.

The scarp from the original landslide is still visible. The tree that had slid so long ago had left roots that sprouted a half-dozen shoots. Some were fairly big (one 36" dbh) and in clusters of two or three. I removed the larger of the pairs and the wimps of the bunches to reduce the weight against the supporting slope. Then I climbed the remaining trees to prune away the damage from competition.

From what I have seen, the environmentalists have it dead wrong. They demand no logging on steep slopes because the soils would be disturbed, which might cause a little sluffing that they call erosion. This may be true, but the real question is, how much erosion is caused by thinning compared to the alternative? If we don’t log those slopes, we’ll get trees, large and heavy enough to apply sufficient load to the slope to break loose, just like that tree 250 years ago on my place. If it’s winter, that falling tree could start a chain reaction in a saturated alluvium. It’s called a landslide. Landslides like that are all over these mountains. They choke with weeds, weep silt for years, and the mud can again become unstable slopes when they saturate while still full of rotting logs. By contrast, a large redwood stump cut to the ground line with a small tree on it makes a living retaining wall.

The biggest risk of sedimentation in streams is if we DON’T thin the stands. If the forest burns too hot in a cataclysmic crown fire, the trees WILL die to a greater degree than if it had been clearcut. It will be no mosaic burn; the disturbed area will be huge. There will be no surface plants to slow the water. There will be no duff to filter the soils. When it rains, the suspended solids will act like abrasive slurry to cut the soil and destabilize slopes. There will be 0% canopy for nearby streams, but then they will likely be so full of mud it won’t matter to the fish.

On the other hand, if the cluster that grows from the old stump is thinned, and the weaker trees are removed, those that remain will sprout new branches into the gaps on the side that needs the weight. They will thicken and straighten. The bark will continue to thicken to protect the trees from future fires. They will be more capable of forcing roots around their perimeter.

The County wants to ban anybody doing any such "commercial" logging anywhere within 125 feet of a seasonal watercourse, which includes ALL of our $60,000 worth of redwood trees they won’t pay for and won’t care for. The Preservation Hypothesis is the rule of the day. "Do nothing and it will get better as long as we don’t have a fire for two hundred years or so." Or so they hope. They want to designate all riparian corridors "no entry." If I enter my forest to do any kind of designed experiment, remove any brush, trim any tree, log any rotted stump, cut out any warped and twisted sapling, I will be punished as an environmental criminal? Somebody’s twisted opinion of what was done will be permanently entered onto our Record of Title as a crime? Otherwise, we are only allowed to watch it choke, rot, or burn?

First Edition published 2001 by Wildergarten Press, P.O. Box 98, Redwood Estates, CA 95044-0098. URL: http://www.wildergarten.com

Library of Congress Control Number: 2001092201. Vande Pol, Mark Edward, 1954- Contains: 455pp, 3 Figures, 8 Photographs, 15 Charts, 2 Tables, Bibliography, and Index.