I guess these are todays logs??

[ruffcutt]

https://youtu.be/NvbgwdTGoyo

[AHill]

Looks like most of those logs are coming from managed forests, where they cut a stand of trees that were all planted around the same time - not virgin forests that have all manner of different sizes of logs. Pretty impressive operation. I like the aerial view of things.

[Robert Adams]

That's the size and method they have been doing for many decades, big logs have been gone for a very long time.. Good video though.

[jteneyck]

Wow. I'd love to see that in person. That saw that cut a whole log into a stack of boards with no bark on any of them must be something.

John

[Paul K. Murphy]

That was a cool video.
When I was still in elementary school, my family and I toured a mill here in California. It was somewhere up near Crescent City. What I saw was almost exactly what that video showed. The mill was a big one.
I'd love to do that again, but these days that sort of thing is too political. I figure that just about the time I got to enjoying myself, somebody would screw it up with a protest.
Too bad, I'd like to see it now even more because woodworking has become my career.

[Bobby Thompson]

I worked as an electrician in one for 3 years. The saws they use are known as chip-n-saws. They go through chippers creating a square cant. The saws are set for a specific thickness and cut the cant producing different size boards.

[ianab]

The logs look like matchsticks because that big grapple just grabs the whole truckload on one go. Up close they are actual logs, probably 18"+ on the fat end. Because there are harvested tree length, they go down to not much more than 4" Hence that first stage of trimming and sorting the logs into various grades, then the consistent logs are loaded into the saw that's set up to handle that size.

Pretty much zero waste. The chips will be used for pulp / paper production, and anything they can't sell would be used as fuel to make steam for the dry kiln and produce electricity to power the plant. A couple of the big local mills even sell excess generation back to the power companies, they have 30-40mW generating capacity on site.

But yes it will be plantation softwoods. Locally that would be Pinus Radiata, but in other climates it might be Douglas Fir. Crop rotation here is ~25 years, harvest, replant, wait 25 years, rinse and repeat.

Have a look at this map. It's not fields of corn, it's trees.
Google Maps

[Bob DeViney]

Vaagen Bros. participated in some BLM assembled land exchanges in NE Washington State late 90's-mid 00's. They manage their own timber lands as well as bidding sales of private and federal timber. Old timers call those pecker poles, but that's pretty much run of the mill (pun) these days. If a private land owner had a few large trees to log, I think he'd be hard pressed to find a mill setup to handle them anymore.

[MichaelMouse]

AHill said:

---

Looks like most of those logs are coming from managed forests, where they cut a stand of trees that were all planted around the same time - not virgin forests that have all manner of different sizes of logs. Pretty impressive operation. I like the aerial view of things.

---

Clearcut is the preferred method for softwoods. Selective cut for hardwoods. With the climate here, it's ~40 year cycle of harvest, fertilize and reseed, thin, and harvest. Hardwood stands are worked at perhaps 10 year intervals.

It's a crop, like corn or beans.

[Sawdustd]

What an amazing mill. Far cry from the small mill I worked at in 1959 in Koski, ID as a scaler for the USFS, Nezperce Na't'l Forest, Selway District. Yep, we'd call those size logs "pecker poles" because of their small diameter. Logs coming out of the woods at that time averaged 30"-36", Doug Fir and Ponderosa. Every once and a while the loggers would run into a stand of larch, 16"-24" which we called "pecker poles.