Adventures with sawdust

Because I have a completely awesome instructor, my Timber Harvesting & Products class gets to take the best field trips ever. We recently traveled to the McDonald-Dunn Forest near Corvallis to observe the Oregon State University student logging crew in a thinning operation, and then went to the historic, zero-automation Hull-Oakes mill in Dawson for a tour, and finally to Freres Brothers mill in Lyons to observe a state-of-the-art automated operation. Thank goodness our instructor is energetic and excited about putting these trips together.

Updates and some slightly unsettling questions

What a busy few weeks! I’ve had a very strange and thought provoking experience, recently, which is mostly what I want to talk about in this post — especially if any of you can weigh in on the issue. But rather than append random updates to the end of the discussion, I’ll get them out of the way right off the top for those who are interested.

So, as far as school goes, I’ve recently begun doing watershed surveys, involving visual protocols and generating to-scale maps of a reach. It’s been fun, and more than a little wet. I want to post an update with scans once I get more done. Same goes for my silviculture class, in which a group of us are working on a restoration proposal for an area of greenspace on our campus. I’m becoming pretty comfortable with ArcGIS, too — and would heartily recommend Getting to Know ArcGIS to anyone wanting to learn this program. The book is fabulous and practical, and comes with a trial of the program suite, too — though Mac users will be out of luck.