Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Recent photos of the ranch

Here are some recent photos from around the ranch, showing logging and some work that was done restoring fish habitats on our creek.

This first picture is some logging being done on one 40-acre parcel in the remotest part of the ranch. They took out mostly Douglas fir, White fir and some alder. Even some red cedar. The baby trees (less than 10 years old) you see in the adjacent lots (left and right of our logging operation) belong to the BLM. We want our replanting to look like that! It's much harder than you'd think to achieve.

logging on Chandler Ranch 2006


Next are some photos of logs placed in the creek by a Stream Restoration expert -- they were dragging around trees, rootwads and all, and putting them in the creek. In the winter the creek can get to be 6-8 feet deep at times, and a lot of water moves through it. If there are no trees in the streambed, then it scours the sand and rocks away and leaves only "boulders and bedrock", which is what much of our creek was liike. This was a result of forest management practices of the mid 20th Century - when old time foresters and Fish & Wildlife people were telling us to clean out the creeks of all trees. That was done, and the result was fewer fish. They need the gravel that builds up behind the fallen trees, to spawn and spend their first months of life hiding from predators. There are more fish in the creek now than we have seen for many years, as a result of some work that was done like this in other areas of the creek in the last few years. These trees will be half-buried in rocks and gravel by this time next year, and we'll have even more fish.

stream restoration project 2006

stream restoration project 2006


And here are some red elderberries -- they grow everywhere here and are large plants 15-20 feet high, 10-15 feet in diameter. I've cut one down to a stump and had it be 10 feet tall the next year - that's one year's growth. We've heard these can be eaten if boiled first, but they smell so nasty when you pick them it hardly seems worth the effort. Even the birds leave them alone. They are pretty, though!
Red elderberry

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