© 2024 | Jefferson Public Radio
Southern Oregon University
1250 Siskiyou Blvd.
Ashland, OR 97520
541.552.6301 | 800.782.6191
a service of Southern Oregon University
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

"What's That Helicopter Up To?"

For much of this winter, residents of Ashland have heard the daily chop-chop-chop of a helicopter making hundreds of trips over the hills just outside town. It’s part of a project to thin the nearby forest of smaller trees and brush that could fuel a destructive wildfire.

In keeping with the goal of ecosystem restoration, foresters are using the helicopter to remove cut timber rather than dragging fallen trees across the forest floor. 

On nearly any quiet morning these last few months, distant rotor blades echo and fade as a logging helicopter bops up and down between the mountain ridges above Ashland.

Pilot Ricky Moore of Timberline Helicopters, Inc., says it’s not dangerous to fly among the treetops with a long cable dangling below you … if you know what you’re doing.

“You really don’t think about it,” Moore says. “You flow with it. You throw the hook out in front of you and you chase it down to the guy, and you keep your eyes on the guys, and you’re always looking back up at the instruments, you’re looking out the window at the trees around you to make sure you have rotor separation from them.”

It’s fast, repetitive and precise work to maneuver into place a 200 pound hook suspended on a long cable for the ground crew below. Sometimes he can hardly even see them.

“Not real well, because it’s a really thick canopy,” Moore says. “But they have high-powered little LED flashlights, and they’ll shine it and it flashes at me. And I’ll say ‘Okay, I got your light,’ and then, boom, there I am.”

The ground crew steps back and gives the pilot room to toss the hook into place. You might think he hovers overhead and lowers the hook slowly, but you’d be wrong.

“To come in high and come down slow, it takes a lot of time, so we come down the hill at about 100 knots, and if I can get a bead on your position I start slowing it down, and as I do that the hook flies out underneath me and so I’ll throw it and as I guess where you are I’ll come over the top of it, it’ll stop and ... boop ... right down into them.”

Within seconds, the ground team moves in to attach that hook to a bundle of logs they’d already strapped together, and the helicopter carries the two- to three-ton payload to a nearby landing where the pilot gently lays the logs down. Every few minutes, all day long, the helicopter goes back and forth, so these guys do this dance maybe 200 times a day.

Joshua Budziak is a supervisor with Ashland’s non-profit Lomakatsi Restoration Project. He says even though the timber is sold to the mill, the trees aren’t harvested for their economic value, but because -- after a century of aggressive fire prevention -- the forest is thick and overgrown.

“We’re leaving the biggest and best,” Budziak says. “Any tree over 150 years old we’re leaving. And we’re thinning out these smaller ones that are going to be a problem in the future when we do get a fire in the Ashland watershed. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.”

Lomakatsi manages this $6.5 million dollar federal grant in the Ashland watershed for its partners the City of Ashland, the Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Forest Service. This is only one of several similar projects Lomakatsi manages across Oregon and Northern California, covering thousands of overgrown woodland acres.

Executive Director Marko Bey says the rationale for the logging operation and ground cleanup is simple: to remove all the accumulated fuels and underbrush that could lead a small fire into the treetops, so the forest can resist or survive a wildfire with its ecosystem intact.

“We’re not gonna be able to stop high-intensity fires everywhere,” he says. “We can’t fire-proof the forest, but we can make the forest more resilient to fire, and reduce that severity of fire where we choose to do that work.”

Meanwhile, back at the landing, the logs are processed by a “dangle-head delimber” – a swiveling contraption something like a mechanical dinosaur, that sucks in whole trees on one side and spits out cut-to-measure logs on the other side in mere seconds.

“That’s the machine with the saw you see on it right there, so it’s going to be measuring diameter and length," says  Lomakatsi’s Joshua Budziak. "That’s a 35 foot log he cut off there. And this one’s gonna be shorter. And he can measure the top there, he’s gonna cut it off at six inches.”

And voila! ... the logs are piled and ready for loading onto trucks that get up there via Tolman Creek Road, which remains closed not far from town, as well as many of the area’s recreational trails inside the 1,200 acre project area.

Lomakatsi had hoped to re-open the roads and trails by the end of February but weather delays grounded operations more than expected this winter. The agency says the entire area should be reopened for public use sometime this spring.