I've had trouble getting things to work on this site today so just went in a round about fashion to post.
Here is some more of Forestry.

  My real introduction to Forestry and logging started in 1953 when I became a compassman in the BC Forest Service.  Timber cruising in those days was a basic process of running strip lines across the contours and tallying trees over fourteen inches at breast height. Height samples were taken periodically to obtain an average so that a calculation of total volume could be made. In 1954 I transferred to the Prince George Forest District.  Cruising was basically the same except that we tallied trees down to ten inches breast high. Balsam was not measured only acknowledged as being present as was cedar or hemlock when it was encountered.

  Later when I was old enough to become an Assistant Ranger (twenty one), my real education of the role of the Forest Service and it’s relationship to the industry got underway.

  In the mid 1950’s there were no tree farm licenses in the interior and Timber Sales were sold by public auction. This method generated fair revenue to the Province as the bidding would start from an upset price as calculated by Ministry staff. The logging companys had their own method of calculating the value of the timber which was basically a combination of the cost of logging, milling and selling price. Most sales were bid above the upset value which was what was called stumpage plus royalty. This stumpage would be due to the province for every boardfoot (later cubic foot and now cubic metre) of harvested wood. In the interior the one “fly in the ointment” was occasional spite bidding where one operator would deliberately bid a block of timber beyond it’s value hoping that a rival would purchase it and suffer financially.

    Tree harvesting or “stand treatment” as it was called was very basic prior to 1950 but in the early ‘50’s new treatments were introduced, many of them with merit and some of them dismal failures. It was obvious to those of us charged with administrative responsibility that a successful treatment in one stand or one geographic location was not necessarily a correct treatment in other locations, yet the decision making staff became enamoured with ‘fads’.

  For example; single seed tree selection which was a simple treatment of leaving a few dominant trees standing with in a cutting area was eminently successful in the dryer Douglas Fir dominated stands. Fir are more resistant to windthrow, the stress of  being exposed after all neighboring trees had been harvested resulted in bumper seed crops for one year to three years. Inevitably most of these seed trees would die but in their place there would be well established seedlings throughout the logged area.  Someone got the idea that this same treatment should be carried out in spruce stands.  Spruce are not resistant to wind. The idea was one of many disasters. The next trial was to leave small patches of spruce, the idea being that a small block would be more wind resistant.  Again the winds leveled these remaining trees and in the process created small scattered patches of twisted and entwined trees that were economically unfeasible to salvage.