I met with a local Coupeville logger who thinned the southern half of the property around 15-20 years ago. Nice guy and a good short meeting to talk about options and best approaches for clearing and thinning.

Property history tidbits:

• Prior owners: The owner at the time of the thinning had owned the property in the family for a long time. They had no intentions of logging the property so were thinning for forest health and to help the stronger trees flourish better.
• Log loading area: The area where the old logging road ends in a berm was where his team loaded logs onto the trucks. At least for that thinning operation, the logging road did not extend further. This makes sense with the clearing, berm, and trees beyond.
• Area thinned: They did not do any thinning on the north half/sloped portion of the site, which is also very evident by the amount of woody debris on the forest floor and over-stocked conditions in some locations there.

Plans:

• Projects: He can coordinate installation of a driveway, logging, and sale/removal of logs. There is a gravel pit fairly close where he could get gravel to provide a base for the driveway. He recommended coordinating with someone else for limb pruning.
• Log landing area: The building site area could be used as a landing area. Logs in the southerly cleared section could be directly handled by machinery, and in the northerly area clearing logs could be chained and winched up the hill to avoid machinery going back and forth across the hillside.