Colorado looks to logging to help re-balance forests
By BRUCE FINLEYDecember 13, 2020 GMT
GOULD, Colo. (AP) — Stunned by unprecedented megafires, Colorado is embracing logging — mowing holes up to 140 acres in beetle-infested lodgepole pines — in an effort to revive out-of-balance forests.
This for-profit mechanized tree-cutting, concentrated between the blackened Cameron Peak and East Troublesome burn scars, has been clearing 3,000 acres a year.
And state foresters propose to clear more.
At two cutting sites west of Fort Collins recently, hulking red and yellow tractors equipped with whirling hot saws sliced through 12-inch trunks of the towering pines, then as they thumped to the ground raked them into bunches. De-limbers stripped off branches. Hooked pinchers hoisted the logs into bus-sized loads for diesel-belching trucks. Drivers hauled these along icy mountain roads to sawmills at Saratoga and Parshall, where workers convert logs to lumber as a surging national wood-products market pays record prices.