Week 5: Harvesting Lodge Poles

Sept 28th, 2007

This week has been all about refilling our stash of lodge poles for building worm fences. This picture was taken a few weeks ago, and the actual pile was a lot smaller when we got to it this week. Probably less then 75 poles left. Later, after the pictures from the week, I have an "after" photo of the same pile and how much we accomplished with a little help from a few friends...




This is where we worked. Southern Tahoe region outside of Meyers, CA once again. This is the most remote area we have worked yet, and it wasn't actually an urban lot like we normally work in, it was a tree felling area that was burned about a year ago. Unfortunately for us, there was a problem with us being there using our lowly saws, because there were huge machines that could cut down, limb, and make into 10 foot poles at about 6 times the speed we could.




As pictured here. These monstrosities literally could take down 4 trees at one time. So, on Tuesday we actually got to saw and cut down some trees. I don't have any pictures of this feat, but I cut down 3! Yup, count em', 1, 2, 3! It's not a lot for the kids on saw crews, but this was the first time since orientation that I had used a saw for more then a fence. It was fantastic! I had a blast. The trees fell exactly where I wanted them to, and there were no complications. Because of the machines though, we were no longer able to cut trees on Wednesday or Thursday.


Instead we were "forced" to either go to another area, or help the man in the machine by rolling barbed wire that was in his way for the price of as many 10 foot poles as we could carry... A worthy cause!









Below is a video of us putting the poles into the trailer. It's intense, and I will tell you why... these poles weigh anywhere from 10 pounds to 80 pounds a piece. Some are live, some are dead, and we needed both. Sadly, the heaviest and most cumbersome are the live trees and that's what we had most of. There were a few logs where we needed 3 or even 4 people to carry them.






Colton was our resident sawyer for Thursday making sure all of the trees were exactly 10 feet to fit in our trailer. At first, because of the size, we were unable to carry more then 20 logs at one time, but when they were 10 feet exactly, we were able to fit over 50 in every batch! That was way more then we originally figured we would have, so it was very exciting to know we were not only reaching our goal but surpassing it with flying colours.











Thursday afternoon after lunch, we were so pooped from moving over 300 logs that we all kind of napped for a while. It was an intense nap and needed by almost all of us. The video below is of us hooking the trailer up to our truck. It was a HUGE problem at this particular site because we had to unhook it every time it came back empty and physically (with our entire crew) turn it around in order to get it back out of the area. I would have taken a video of moving it, but we need all of us just to rotate it just 180 degrees.




The anticipated picture of all the work we did. There are so many logs there, you don't even know... that took 3 days and a lot of sweat to create. I'm still amazed at how much we moved and managed to make happen with one trailer.









This is Lake Tahoe on the drive back home, but I'm gonna tell a little story about Wednesday evening here instead of talking about the drive home which is rather boring...
Thursday was Andrew's birthday (our crew leader) and we knew that he wanted to try a Thai restaurant down the road from where we were staying in Camp Rich. Thus, last week we plotted in order to surprise him with a night out for his big day (he was turning 23, and we all know how special that birthday is...). It was a very involved plan including but not limited to pretending to have a broken truck, lying through our teeth about our educational experience for the week, and surprising the crap out of him! I wish I had pictures of his face when he realized what we were pulling, but needless to say, we were all very very happy with the outcome and the food was delicious as well. He was impressed we remembered his birthday, and also thought it was important enough to celebrate. Of course we couldn't do anything less, so I'm glad it came off so well. It was the highlight of everyone's week and it was a nice ending to a great project.