I made a 15 minute video of some of the new trails we cleared at the Little Hogback Community Forest (LHCF) in preparation for our upcoming timber harvest. (If 15 minutes is too long for you, the narration is still intelligible if you play it at 1.25X speed.)
We needed a better landing, improvements to some trails and some new ones put in to provide access for the harvest. The video shows some of the trail after it has been cleared and roughed in by the excavator we hired. It looks much better now than what you see here. I haven't gotten around to getting pictures or video since he went over it with the dozer.
We decided to do the trail clearing ourselves, to help keep the costs down. Several of the owners pitched in felling, limbing, and clearing things off the new trails. On parts of the trail the sidehill was too steep to access with any of the vehicles we had available, so we dropped, limbed and sectioned the trees, cleared as much as I could reach with the logging winch on my tractor (230' of cable, two 20' chains as an extension, and dropping the last trees toward the chain so we could grab the top were as far as we could go.) There was about 600 feet left where we had to leave anything we could not easily move by hand for the excavator to clear from the path. We'll go back and pick up most of it as firewood now that we can get down the trails. In all, we cleared about 3400' of new trails.
Wherever possible, we kept the slope of the trails under 7% grade. This allows us to use broad based dips for erosion control, rather than waterbars. Our trails are also used for recreation, so they see more regular traffic. We don't allow motorized vehicles other than for forest management work, but part of how we accomplish our management goals is through firewood harvesting by any members with an interest. So we do see more regular vehicle traffic over time than what a typical closed logging trail would see. We find the broad based dips hold up better over time and require less maintenance, but they just don't work on steeper slopes.
