The team of big horses blew long shafts of steam from their nostrils as they marched in unison out of the trees, pulling the knurled white oak log onto the log yard. The long reins trailed on the ground behind. From thirty yards up the skid trail Mike's voice rang out, "Whoa!" The horses had made the trip down to the log yard so many times now that sometimes Mike just let them "have their head," while he walked a little slower to catch his breath. He deserved it. We were nearing the end of the job, and Mike and his team of Belgian draft horses had brought almost 75,000 board feet of timber down out of the woods-enough to build five houses. In addition, he harvested nearly fifty pick-up loads of firewood and ten tons of pulpwood. We started working together on the Brown Gap Timber Sale in September, but now the winter rains were setting in and we needed to finish the project soon to meet Forest Service requirements.

The Chattooga River Watershed Coalition (CRWC) purchased the Brown Gap Timber Sale in a "first of it's kind" collaborative project between the USDA Forest Service and a non-profit conservation organization. The project's goal was to log 10 acres of the Nantahala National Forest using a type of timber harvesting called "single tree selection." We had been promoting this method of logging for years, because it closely mimics the natural processes of tree regeneration in the forests of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. With single tree selection, trees of all sizes are harvested to extract high quality saw timber and improve stand composition. Yet, at the same time much of the forest canopy is retained, in layers from the dominant large trees, down to the shrubs and herbaceous understory plants on the forest floor. Retaining and cultivating a more diverse forest habitat results in a healthier forest ecosystem.

Executing a single tree selection harvest requires more skill and care in order not to damage the residual "leave trees;" therefore, it is a slower process than, for example, clearcutting. Because there is a great demand for wood products, many timber companies have switched to more intensive methods of timber harvesting (seed-tree, shelterwood and clearcutting) where most or all of the forest canopy is removed. Nowadays, one of the big questions about single tree selection is whether or not it is economically feasible; that is, can wood products produced in this manner compete in a market place geared to maximum fiber production?

Originally, everyone thought we proposed the horse-logging sale, but it was actually the Forest Service's idea. The project was the brainchild of Jim Kidd, who works in the Highlands Ranger District office, which lies in the Chattooga River's headwaters in North Carolina. Jim wanted to test the feasibility of using horses to log in sensitive areas. But the project area was intimidating: parts of the tract were steep, and the trees were big. Two of the white pines (Pinus strobus) that were marked for harvest were 38 inches in diameter at breast height (dbh). When nobody stepped forward to bid on the sale, I began exploring the idea of negotiating modifications to the sale, to make it more environmentally sensitive. One of the Coalition's goals is to seek ways to work cooperatively with the Forest Service. If the Coalition purchased the Brown Gap Timber Sale, it would give us a chance to put our ideas into action while creating an opportunity to build better relations with the Forest Service. I also began looking for a logger with experience, and frankly, a little "metal."

Fortunately, Dr. Bob Zahner is a member of our Board of Directors, and also a respected forester and educator. Bob was enthusiastic about the project, and helped negotiate the terms of the sale. Forest Service scientists participated in these negotiations as well, since the sale area was situated in the Blue Valley Experimental Forest. Yet, from the beginning it was clear that our objectives were not exactly the same. The Forest Service was more interested in experimenting with the regeneration white pine, a prime merchantable timber tree, while Dr. Zahner and I were focused on the restoration all native forest species. Many of our forest management recommendations were based on the "Chattooga Conservation Plan," which the Coalition produced in 1997. Here, we had used Geographic Information Systems to help create a forest management model that adhered to principles of conservation biology, which considers all forest management activities in light of how the area fits into the whole landscape. Brown Gap lies in what we call a "core area." As described in our conservation plan, a core area should "be left alone to mature into viable interior forest, and old-growth habitat." In our plan, no new roads would be built here, and other roads would be closed or converted to backcountry trails. Timber harvesting would be allowed, but only to expedite restoring the native forest, and where roads already exist.

The Brown Gap Timber Sale area was probably an old farmstead, that previously was cleared for pasture. When the land was abandoned at the turn of the century, the old fields provided a perfect place for the propagation of white pine seedlings, which thrived and matured into an even-aged stand of big trees. Dr. Zahner believed that if some of the white pines were harvested, this would release the native hardwoods coming up in the understory, allowing a more natural stand to develop. Since a road already existed in the sale area, we felt this was a good place to negotiate an opportunity to implement the recommendations of our conservation plan. After two years of sporadic negotiations, the Forest Service agreed to several changes from the original timber harvest. They agreed to drop a small portion of the sale that was located on a steep slope near a riparian area. They also allowed the retention of a larger percentage of native hardwoods, which would increase native biological diversity, as well as some of the larger white pines, for old growth.

We had other objectives, too. One of our primary goals for the Brown Gap Timber Sale was to prove that the small operator was ideally suited for timber harvesting projects that resulted in an intact native forest, and that the wood products from this project could compete in the local market place, while utilizing local services. This would result in a healthier forest, and a healthier economy in the community. Small, community-based forest product industries are ideally suited to conduct single tree section operations, because oftentimes they use smaller equipment that allows them to maneuver through the forest and cut selected trees without doing damage to the residual trees. In the past, most all timber sales on our national forest have been large sales, sometimes spread over hundreds of acres. They are cut by large mechanized equipment, such as "feller-bunchers," which harvest a great percentage of the forest canopy. This type of timber harvesting usually includes regenerating trees through natural seeds and stump sprouts, or hand-planting trees (usually pine trees) of the same age. With these large-scale operations, loggers must produce sometimes as much as 10,000 board feet in a single day's operation, just to make enough money to sustain payments on behemoth skidders and 18 wheel logging trucks. Here, the skid roads accessing the forest are akin to highways. Many of the wood products harvested by the big operators are trucked to distant points outside of the local community for processing, and sometimes even overseas. So, it seemed to us that the Brown Gap Timber Sale was the ideal place to test our theory.

On January 14, 1998, the CRWC signed a contract to purchase the Brown Gap Timber Sale. I hired Mike Barrick to log for the Coalition, because I liked his methods. We found Mike in Ohio, and he was a full time logger. He had learned how to log with horses from his father, and from the Amish people who lived near his farm. He used a mechanism called a "skipper" which looks like a square sled about four feet long. It was amazingly simple: two runners were made of Black Gum, which is a strong and light wood that doesn't split easily. The steel runners on the skipper's bottom were made of discarded truck springs. A light, case-hardened logging chain was doubled and then passed through a metal ring mounted to the skipper's front cross member, providing a point of attachment for the "double tree" behind the horses. The tail ends of the chain ran under the skipper and up over the top of the log, where they hooked together. When the horses pulled forward, the chains cinched down on the log, binding it to the sled. But getting the logs on the sled was tricky. Mike would pass a chain under the log, and attach one end to the cross member of the skipper. The horses were positioned perpendicular to the log, and hooked to the other end of the chain. As the horses pulled forward, the chain rolled the log onto the sled. Thus secured, the skipper got the butt-end of the log up off the ground. This enabled the horses to pull more weight, because the skipper slid forward with less friction than logs would on the ground, and could "skip" over debris and stumps. In addition, the skipper would prevent the leading end of the log from plowing up the soil on the skid trail. This method also kept the logs cleaner, which made the sawyers happy because a clean log will not dull or break saw teeth.

It was January 5th, 1999, and the temperature had warmed up to 4 degrees, from a low of zero the previous night. Several other logging operations in the Blue Valley/Highlands Plateau had shut down, mostly due to trucks that wouldn't crank in the cold. But it was one of the best days we had had for logging in weeks. There were three of us on the job that day.

Besides Mike and me, there was Walter Wilson: local preacher, barber, storyteller, and 'coon hunter. Walter knew every inch of Blue Valley, and where every hollow tree was that might be home to the next old 'coon for his bluetick hounds to chase. Walter and his family had been in the Highlands area for generations. He taught us about the cultural and land use history of the area in such a way that it made us wiser, and tickled our funny bones to boot. We needed his positive attitude on such a day-it made the cold bearable. Walter and I were cutting up firewood that Mike brought out with the horses. We weren't even using the skipper that day, because the ground was frozen solid and the logs slid along easily without tearing up the soil. Nonetheless, it was hard work. Walter was stout for a man of in his 60's; all of those years chasing 'coon dogs up and down the hills of Blue Valley had made him strong and tough.

Hard work was welcome on that day because it kept us warm. The cold made me think of that balmy September day when we first started cutting the big trees. Mike was felling them, while I cut off their limbs and bucked up the trees into logs for skidding. We had stood pondering a big white pine that was about three feet thick and leaning over the crest of the hill toward the steep site. "We may have to use a cable to pull that one out," Mike said, "because it will have to go over the hill." Mike was an expert in "pulling" the trees, or using directional felling techniques to make a tree go some other way than it is leaning. But this one was leaning too much. "You want to drop this one?" Mike asked. "Sure," I answered. The trepidation in my voice was noticeable. With Mike's coaching I cut a felling notch, to direct the tree to fall away from a good white oak that was a "leave" tree. Then I made the back cut, leaving a little "hang wood" on the side of the falling tree, hoping it would pull away from the leave tree as it fell. The big tree snapped several smaller trees as it tore through the canopy and crashed to the ground with tremendous force. The butt end of the tree catapulted up about three feet, as the bulk of the it went over the hillside. Seeing the shattered saplings reminded me of the stories I had read in an old manuscript that described the first harvesting in the Chattooga watershed. Then, several men had been killed by the whiplash from saplings springing up after being pulled over by a felled tree. Logging is, without doubt, quite dangerous work. "Well, you don't get that too often" Mike said, pointing to the elevated butt of the tree. "All we have to do is drag the sled under the butt log and let it fall right onto the sled" said Mike, as he fired up the chainsaw. I was surprised to see him cut the first log into a 20-foot length. Soon, it became apparent that he was trying to pull as much of the log as he could up and over the hill from the flatter side. The horses must have sensed that this was going to be a tough pull. They advanced automatically to take out the slack in the traces, and leaning against the tremendous weight of the log, attentively waited for the command from Mike. "Gee up!" he barked. Jake and Charlie exploded into their harness. They lunged forward-two tons of muscle and guts straining against the log-their bellies almost on the ground as they drove with all their strength. The log lurched forward, and then suddenly there was a loud "snap!" and clattering of chains. A leather tug had broken. "Woah! Woah!" Mike yelled at the confused horses, who were still lunging forward. Mike looked at the broken tug with disgust. "These things were due anyway" he muttered, as he drove the team off towards the log deck. The next day I walked up to the scene and the log was gone. Mike had repaired the harness, and early that morning finished pulling the tree over the hill.

Needless to say, the horse logging operation was attracting a significant amount of local interest. Hardly a day went by that there weren't visitors on site: forestry students, local folks, retired horse loggers and Forest Service personnel, to name a few. The most interesting visitors were the old-time horse loggers. Claude Nix, a stout man in his seventies, came one day to watch. Claude didn't talk much, but you could sense the memories coming back to him of the days in the 1940's and 50's when he worked horses in the Burrell's Ford area on the Chattooga River. Walter got him to talking, and we listened to his stories of breaking teams of horses brought in for logging from out west. We fired the questions as he began to open up. "How did you break them? What kind were they?" Finally, he was quiet, and then as an after thought, he said with guarded pride, "But I never quit one." I thought of the caliber of individuals that I had been accustomed to at Blue Valley, and wondered if there was some correlation between strong character and working hard, close to the earth.

As the months passed, the logging was going great-but there were problems. Horse logging costs more money than mechanized logging, because it requires more skill and time. The added cost of logging, and some other factors shut us out of selling a portion of the unprocessed logs in the local market. So, we decided to saw all of the logs into dimensional lumber on site. By doing so, we could target specialized custom-order markets, while saving an extra haul cost by taking the product directly to the customer. We even found a dealer who bought all of our larger sourwood trees, which we sawed into lumber for his woodcarving market. We also sold to the timber frame market, that requires bigger and longer beams-which bring higher prices.

For this part of the operation we employed Terry Ketterman, a local sawyer who owns a portable Woodmizer bandsaw mill. A band mill saw blade is narrower than a circular saw mill blade, and consequently yields less sawdust and more lumber, or "overrun," as it is known in the trade. Terry is one of the best sawyers in the area. Periodic checks of beam sizes were never off by more than one-eighth of an inch. To help him saw, Terry employed Jack Billingsly. Jack lived only ten miles down the road, and he was one of the hardest working men on the job. Nothing seemed to bother Jack, unless it was missing a good opportunity to go hunting. During the time we were at Blue Valley, he killed a deer and a bear, but still rarely took time off from the job. When we ran out of room on the log deck, Jack offered the field on his property as a log yard, and we began hauling logs to this place. Together, Terry and Jack made a formidable team.

The same day it was so cold, we began to plan for notifying the Forest Service that we were almost done. A few days later, Max Riddle, the Highlands Ranger District's Timber Sales Administrator, came out to inspect the sale. Mike seemed nervous as we walked through every inch of the sale. There was plenty of interest in our project, and in particular, our quality of work. Max was very fair in his evaluation. At the end of the walk-through, we found only seven damaged trees. Max was quite complimentary of our work, and said we had done as little damage as he had ever seen on a national forest timber sale.

When the last marked trees were harvested, Mike was ready to go home. For four months, he had been here working steadily, under extreme weather conditions almost the whole time. For the Coalition, this was just the end of "phase one": the logging. We had sawed, sold and delivered over half of the lumber. We were breaking even, but there were still 10,000 board feet of logs to saw and deliver. Stacks of lumber remained unsold, from the overrun. But the most important part was over. We had proved that horses could be used effectively for single tree selection, and with minimal damage to soil and residual trees. We had kept the markets local, so far, and created many new jobs in adding value to the raw logs. We had raised public awareness and support, and we worked cooperatively with the Forest Service in a bold experiment.

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