7/11/2019

We were packed and ready to go by 7:30 when Claude S. and Evet came to the fire management to greet us. They gave us a brief overview of the forestry and its relationship with the logging industry. They then took us to a couple of active logging sites in the forest and showed us the different machinery. We got to see the machines in action as they brought them down and stacked them into piles. Claude showed us how they can determine how much a log will provide in terms of how many boards it will produce. The site that we were taken to was east bearer 217-219 log block #80 and it is projected to make 2 million board feet. The way they measure it is that if a tree is 41 feet long the company will only pay for 40 feet of it, that extra foot is for if there is any rot that needs to be cut off and such. The tree that is 40’ long and 24’’ in diameter will give 500 board feet. They can then estimate that if a truck can carry at least between 10 and 14 of these trees it can make 7840 board feet. They also told us about the process of how the trees are marked and sent to the different mill and then replanted. What was really interesting to me was that a few years in advance they send out workers to gather closed still green pine cones and then ship them to places in order to grow saplings. This was interesting because this means that they are taking the seeds of trees already there and replanting them, this way they are not introducing new species of trees. When logging an area they want at least 6-7 seed giving tees per acre, the preferred tree is Ponderosa Pine they are usually marked by yellow paint. Trees with blue paint are the logging boundary. The type of machinery that they showed us was the feller bundle which cuts the trees down, the skidder which takes the trees down the hill, the delimber/stroker which takes off all the limbs off the tree, and the shovel which stacks all the logs and branches into piles. We were told that in that area the youngest person was 41 and the oldest was 55, many people think that logging is a dying field when it actually has a high need for more people. Evet is the only women in that crew and she does a lot of the supervising and using GPS to track the skidd trails, she is also going to school to further her knowledge about her job. She plans to write a book about the birds of Warm Springs.

 Then Evet brought us to the Twanta museum to meet some of the community’s elders. There were many elders there as well as a chief. They told us stories about their child hood and made known their concerns about the environment and how it’s changed since they were children. It was very humbling and enlightening to be able to hear these people speak and see from their point of view. One of the elders told of her time where children of the indigenous community were put in boarding schools and taken from their parents as they had no rights at the time. She didn’t see her parents for years and yet when her granddaughter told her that she had a tough childhood she didn’t think that she did and she just tried to enjoy herself. Concerns they had about the environment were the huckleberries and how they are not putting out as many berries as they use to, the place where they gather roots is being overrun with grasses and they don’t know why, also they are concerned about the weather as it’s changing fast. An elder and his intern sang a song to end the meeting which was very beautiful as I have never heard a song sang live before. Many of the elders shook our hands as we left and overall it felt very welcoming.

After the meeting we went to eat flat bread, I had mine with honey and cinnamon which was good, then Jessica took a couple of us to go get the R.V. at the fire management facility where we found that the R.V. was still hooked to the truck so the battery wouldn’t start. Luckily the workers had jumper cables and were able to start the truck again. We are again very thankful for how helpful and accommodating the people of the Fire management facility were, I hope they continue to do well.