Conscientious Timber Harvesting for a Better Woods
We place your land and well-being at the center of everything we do for your woods.
When we drive our trucks, grapples, and skidders onto your land, there’s always the risk of property damage. Broken creek banks can disrupt natural water flow, ruts can cause destructive soil erosion, and when uprooted soil is not replanted, weeds and invasive species diminish your woodland’s ecosystem.
For over 50 years, we’ve been honing our methods to align with the care and consideration we put into our free evaluations. As much as we listen to you, we listen to your land, taking every precaution to tread lightly and harvest carefully, so your woods comes back with the character and vibrancy you expect.
How Our Harvest Minimally Impacts Your Land
We do our best to tread lightly by:
Avoiding the creation of trails if possible
These trails, called “skid trails,” are ruts created when logs are pulled to a central collection location. Though they’re often included in early planning discussions, they nonetheless appear to landowners as sites of damage and disruption. Vegetation gets trampled and uprooted, and if left untended, the trails are susceptible to weeds and flooding.
While it’s difficult to move every tree without creating a few trails, we ensure each of our trails is purposefully placed, minimally invasive, and easily reclaimed post-harvest.
Practicing directional felling to minimize damage
Directional felling involves cutting the tree trunk to control the direction it falls. With a chainsaw, the logger makes diagonal cuts toward the heart-center of the tree, with the lower cuts determining the side the tree falls. The obvious benefit of this practice is safety. While protecting people is our number-one priority, we also use directional felling to protect trees you want to keep standing, for aesthetics, cover, or future harvests.
Falling trees can take down their neighbors if not carefully felled. Our crews know how to cut to protect your standing timber, your land, and your loved ones.
Using folding steel bridges to prevent the need to break down banks
Using steel bridges to move heavy machinery across gaps helps maintain your land’s natural drainage patterns and reduces ruts that welcome invasive species. While these bridges can cause some damage, it’s considerably less than the damage caused by lowering the grade of creek beds and streams to allow heavy machinery to pass through to the harvest and collection site. Broken banks disrupt the flow of water along your property, causing every sort of problem from standing water to erosion. Our practice of bridging the gap goes a long way to ensuring your land channels away rainwater and runoff cleanly.
Applying wooden swamp mats to avoid ruts
Swamp mats are thick pieces of lumber that are joined or chained together to provide support for machinery passing over wet or waterlogged ground. In a way similar to fill dirt or sawdust, the mats create a firm surface for walking, dragging, and driving; but unlike dirt and sawdust, the mats can be dug, pulled, or rolled up after the work is finished, minimizing ruts without disturbing your woods’ ecosystem.
Leaving tree tops where they fall
Dragging tops out of the woods means risking scarred bark and broken limbs on timber meant for your next harvest, along with unplanned skid trails that weren’t part of your harvest plan. Leaving tops where they land protects what’s still standing, speeds up decomposition, and gives wildlife instant cover. Here’s the full explanation.
Preventing root and bark damage to remaining trees
Leveling skid trails and seeding log landings to avoid erosion
Reclamation work like this helps your land recover from the harvest quickly. The big gain for you here is undisrupted drainage. Leveling and seeding rutted areas keeps water from pooling and trees from uprooting in loosened soil. These damages make your land less desirable to animals and to your own enjoyment. Rutted land also invites invasive species to take root and serves as a breeding ground for mosquitoes and other pests.