What We're Doing to Help

Forever Redwood Coupon manages 700 acres of average-quality forests that had 95% of the Redwood volume cut in the 60's. By the mid 90's, the forest had too many hardwoods (uncut when the land was harvested) and endless young trees of average to poor quality. Instead of about 80 to 100 trees per acre of all sizes and ages, we inherited over 1,000 mostly small and suppressed trees per acre just waiting for a fire to set them off. Most were dying or going to die from a lack of growing space.

The roads were leaching soil into the streams. Poorly constructed roads were collapsing in the winter storms. You couldn't see a foot in front of you because most trees had grown low lying branches that were in your face. It was the furthest thing from the cathedral-like open spaces under an old-growth forest canopy.

We started in 1995 by thinning out the poorest quality trees and the over-represented tree species (mostly hardwoods and some Douglas-fir). It was an acre by acre "hands-on" thinning from below. A couple chain saws, manual loppers and a pole saw is all we used. We fixed the worst erosion problems by adding lots of natural structure to the soil and thinned most of the lower branches away to lower the fire hazard and open up the understory. It took two men 3 1/2 years working 2 days per week to finish the first 40-acre thinning.