After a dinner at The Woodsman, an interesting lumberjack-themed Thai restaurant in Philomath, Heather and I took a quick trip to the top of Marys Peak. Partway up the mountain we started seeing snowflakes and a dusting of snow on the trees.
Pretty soon we realized we were driving into a big cloud that was producing a snow storm on the top of the peak.
A few weeks ago, this whole road was a few feet deep in snow. In the last week or two it all melted off. The last few days have been cold again. This allowed a bit of snow to fall on Marys Peak again.
At the upper parking lot on Marys Peak looking toward the summit. The wind was incredibly cold and biting.
Heather was brave enough to roll the window down for a minute for a quick photo. Corvallis would be visible in the background on a clear day.
Looking west toward where the ocean would normally be.
On the way down from the summit we stopped off at a logging operation that has been running for the last several months. Earlier in the winter, the logging outfit was plowing the road to allow log trucks and equipment to pass.
This bulldozer is serving as the anchor for a high line on the logging operation.
Lots of trees have been felled and are awaiting pickup to the top of the hill. This is probably the second or maybe the third time that this forest has been logged.
Hopefully all of the animals escaped before the felling started. It will take another 40-80 years for the forest to regenerate to the point where the timber is merchantable again. It will take many hundreds of years before it is considered old growth.
Another view of the activity. It is rare that the general public gets to see a logging operation like this up close and personal but throughout the coast range and Cascades in Oregon, and in forests all around the world this is the everyday reality. The world needs timber for a variety of things such as to build houses and to make paper. Until some other cheaper way is found to fill these roles, forests will continue to be logged. I am curious how many cycles of cutting can happen before the soils become exhausted and trees stop growing on the land. It seems to me like this would be a finite amount of time. So it goes in the forests of Oregon.
Indeed — you cannot log indefinitely without replenishing the soil. And where is that fertilizer to come from?
Well the private timber land around Corvallis is already being fertilized and sprayed with pesticides/herbicides. Here are a couple articles (for what they’re worth) from a nearby community that has been having some significant problems with contamination in the last several years:
And of course the forests are also being turned into large monocultures to produce more timber more quickly. That is a whole different matter though.