mhagen wrote in message ...

Working for the last few months here in South Carolina, I've seen why
the pulp market is so low. Trees grow so dang fast down here. I've
seen a 21 year old tree that is 62 feet tall! The fall colors here are
quite nice and work couldn't be more idyllic except for the fact that
I'm sharing the woods with deer hunters. I'm wearing bright colors and
have my FS radio turned up real loud.



Have you ever watched Deliverance?


That was Georgia. The Chattahoochee river, right?

Larry, were you anywhere near those tornadoes?


They mostly bypassed south Carolina but the thunderstorms were pretty
violent as they zoomed on by.

Really big landings were used up here for a while - usually when whole
tree processing was done. Second/third growth, pulp/chip$saw - not big
or particularly valuable trees. The piles left afterward are pretty
big, but the wood left in the stand is minimal. Probably not enough to
support a ground fire the next year. That stand age is past in most of
the region now. There are decent but smallish sawlogs on most trucks.

I really think we need to place a size limit on these landings. Safety
is a very important issue to factor in, also. It seems to me that the
slash should be hauled away concurrently with the operations, to keep
the size of the slash pile down.

Yes, don't those thinned stands look nice?!?!?! It's really
interesting to see what they look like 5 and 10 years from now.
Working here in South Carolina, I'm seeing lots of pine stands in
different stages of growth and with different burning intervals. I'm
also coring trees and seeing the results of thinning and burning on
tree growth. There is a very healthy timber industry down here but
there's not much market for small pine still. Land owners want to thin
but also want some return. Meanwhile, the stands get more and more
crowded and overall growth slows, because the owner hasn't thinned.

Larry