Oyster Farm and big Trees

Sue and I started an oyster farm on the west side of Etolin Island. It was a little closer to Wrangell than Ketchikan. We spent a couple years getting all the permits in place and oysters up and growing and ready to sell. That was an interesting time in out lives. It was completely remote. There are no roads even close to us. It was only boats or airplanes to get around.

The method we were using to grow our oysters was floating rafts. I made rafts using 3” X 10” X 23’ cedar timbers. I put two of them parallel with two more just 4’ long across the ends and covered it with a plastic mesh. Then turned the raft over so that the mesh was on the bottom and we filled the inside with oysters. I was also building buildings on the permitted land. This all took lots of lumber.

In Alaska residents are allowed 10,000 board feet of timber from the US Forest Service each year. I went into the Wrangell Forest Service office to apply for a permit and was told that I could not use the timber for any commercial purposes. Well, that is what I wanted to do so what could I do? The forest Ranger told me that they had a program on the books for years and they were going to do away with it soon but it was just for this purpose. So he wrote me out a small timber sale. I bought 5 spruce trees and 25 cedar trees for $78. He gave me an area about 8 miles from our farm that was about a mile and a half along the water's edge and I was to stay within 200 feet of the beach. It was right up a pretty well protected beach so I could get back and fourth pretty easily.

I cut all five spruce. I dropped them in the water and limbed them when the tide was out. Then as the tide came in it floated the log, all but the butt. Those butts were all between 3 1/2’ and 5’ in diameter and after I topped them at about 18” in diameter the logs were still mostly about 90’ long. So they were big trees and sometimes took some coaxing to get them off the beach so that I could get them to our beach and cut them into lumber at home. Usually when I tied a rope to the small end and pulled it back and fourth a few times with the boat it would come loose.

I had cut 10 of the cedar trees, all about the same size. They were usually a bit larger on the butt but not as tall as the spruce. I cut one that I could not get into the water. I finally cut a 25 foot log off the bottom. My 42" bar would not go clear through where I cut it off. I had to finish the cut from the other side. So that 25 foot log was over 4 feet in diameter at the small end. I still got a good 65 foot log to take back and planned to come back later to cut the big log into boards where it was.

Those big trees are really something to fall. And I was getting to feel pretty confident. I had a book to tell me what to watch for and how to do things to make the tree go where you want it. I had been raining for a couple weeks so I had stayed home and cut lumber and made rafts then but one day the sun came out and looked like a good day to go back to cut another tree or two.

I took my skiff out to the area I was to take my trees and I went to a big cedar that I had been looking at for some time. It was only about 3 ½ feet but went up straight with no limbs for about 50 feet. It looked more like a spruce. But it was up a very steep hillside and about 100 back from the water. I had read that if you cut your notch right and then put a smaller piece of a limb in the notch in just such a way then you cut the tree loose from the back side the notch would close up pinching the limb and making it roll and the butt would jump in the same direction as the rest of the tree.

This hillside was steep enough that I thought if I tried this I could probably get the bottom almost to the waters edge. So I cleared out around the bottom of the tree and got myself an escape route so I could get away and started cutting. Everything went just as it was suppose to until the butt hit the hillside about half way down the hill. When the butt hit it dug in instead of sliding to the bottom as I had hoped. It hit with a tremendous thump that shook the entire hillside. Then the top fell down and hit the water but the bottom was still about 50 feet up the hill and the tree broke in the middle and when those pieces came down there was another big thump.

I heard something behind me and turned around to look up the hill and the trees were all waiving like the wind was blowing hard, but there was no wind. About that time a big long log, what had been a standing dead tree, came shooting down the hill about 15 feet from where I was standing. It had started quite a ways up and was really traveling when it went past me. It hit little ledge I was on which launched this 80’ long snag up and it hit another big cedar tree next to the water about 40 feet up. It hit that tree hard enough to break it in half and then all hell broke loose.

There must have been 50 big trees and all the little stuff and undergrowth that came sliding down off that hillside. When it started I jumped up on the stump of the tree I had cut and faced uphill. I figured I had only one jump because there was nowhere to run. The trees came down both sides of me and when it all stopped I was still standing on the stump looking up and shaking. There was a small outcropping of rock just above me that split the direction of all those trees coming down. God was looking after me that day. It sure wasn't my planning that saved me.

To get to that tree I had tied my skiff quite a ways off to the side and then worked my way under brush and undergrowth to get to the tree. Now all the undergrowth was gone! In fact to get back to my skiff I walked on top of the downed trees half way back. It was a completely different looking hillside. If I had tied my skiff 10 feet closer it would have been pushed under water by all the trees coming down.

I didn’t get any lumber out of that either. The tree I wanted broke and splintered and the others were all so tangled up with the tops in the water on that steep hill that I was afraid to work on them. I also never went on any hillside to cut trees after a good soaking rain again.