LOGGING ROADS

            I just returned from a farm consult that included a 70-acre timber harvest 4 years ago.  That area is coming back beautifully in assorted hardwoods and poplars, some of which are already 15 feet tall.

            What landowners need and what they think they need are often quite different.  In my experience, the land stewardship platform rests on three things:  access, water, control.  And these legs are in order of importance.

            In other words, if you can’t get there, you can’t put in water or control (fencing).  You have to be able to get there.  Indeed, the rabid environmentalists who applaud “roadless areas” understand this in the inverse.  Access is the first step to doing something . . . anything.  So if you don’t want anything done, the best way to make sure that happens is to never develop access.

            But if you’re going to do something you need access.  The 70-acre logged-over acreage lay nicely and of course the loggers had put in access roads to get in and out with their log trucks.  But like the countless other logging roads I’ve ever seen—and farm access lanes in general—it was not built for longevity.  

            The difference between destructive and constructive is slight, but logging roads and farm lanes are notoriously destructively built and maintained.  On this cutover tract, the roads were already virtually impassable due to erosion down on the uphill side.  Apparently at excavator school, operators learn to in-slope the road.  That makes sense on public roads where people drive at highway speeds.  If it were out-sloped, you’d feel like you were flying off the curve.

            But on farm roads, we aren’t driving 50 miles an hour.  Out-sloping eliminates any culverts and helps get the water off.  Water kills a road two ways:  volume and velocity.  The faster you can get water off a road surface and the less it accumulates before exiting, the longer a road will last and the easier it is to maintain.

            On farm roads, we install either broad based dips or water bars (berms at 45 degrees to the road) to knock off water.  Obviously the steeper the road the more often you need to put these water bars because even a little water, at velocity, makes gullies in the road.  In just 4 years, these logging roads on this property had up to 3 ft. deep gullies on the uphill side.  All they’d have had to do was tilt the road slightly the other direction and put in some water bar diversions and the road would still be usable.

            As it is, the land owner is now facing a $20,000 excavation cost (or more) just to get these roads usable.  Why are the roads necessary?  This land could be used for hunting, raising pigs, growing mushrooms, harvesting firewood and lumber, or even access to vacation cottages.  Every meaningful use depends on decent access.  It is virtually worthless without access.

            It wouldn’t have taken the logging crew any extra time to build the roads right instead of wrong.  It’s symptomatic of our cultural addiction to think short-term rather than long-term.  This once-in-a-lifetime harvest should have been used as a landscape access opportunity to launch the next centuries of fantastic stewardship.  That includes a cornucopia of use options (massage techniques).  But instead, it left the tract bereft of opportunities, eroding, and worthless.

            It makes me dislike loggers, unfortunately.

            Why can’t people think long-term and eclectically?