This Week in the Woods
Trafton’s art work
Good morning. It sure is nice to have a bit of extra daylight these days. Helps us be able to stay awake past 7pm. Two out of 3 Kimball kids are early birds so we’ve been searching excavators, conveyors, and forwarders on the internet since 5 am.
We’ve had a great couple of weeks in the woods. No breakdowns, trucks lined up, everything ran like a well oiled machine. That was nice seems we can’t do anything about the weather, so having only one challenge is better than 3. We have been working in Casco on a lot that we collaborated with our new forester on. We are excited to build this new relationship and are looking forward to the opportunities this affords us! (Stay tuned for more information on this in the future) The lot we were on was full of mature oak logs and hemlock logs. We also removed some low grade products giving room to the younger oak to grow and mature. The set up was fairly involved as it needed a culvert and a lot of gravel to make it work. Midway through the job, the lovely orange posters were up. Have you noticed? For many people it is almost exciting to see them because it is one of the first signs that Spring is coming, but for me and many other contractors, they make my blood boil. I can’t help but get fired up every time. I drive Chrissy (and everyone else) crazy about it. They have changed the language in the laws about when you can and can’t go so basically I take it if it’s below 32 degrees and my woods road is frozen, then it’s legal to go. We shall see if the troopers are on board with that.
We are pretty much wrapping it up for the season. We have a couple little jobs that are on non-posted roads and then we will head for the shop to do our annual spring maintenance. A local welder, Jason Powers from Powers Welding, is fabricating a mount to attach to our mulching head so I can easily switch from the bucket to the mulcher. I am definitely excited to get that thing to work. We look forward to some sleep and some down time, but it is actually going to be a busy spring with safety trainings, timber tax workshops, conferences, the PLC annual meeting, and Log-a-Load for kids fundraiser which we love!
