 You might say I jumped out of the frying pan into the fire about 1980 and I was in construction doing gunite work, concrete work, helped build a spec house or two and then in 1980 I decided to build a house upon the ranch that my dad owned and he gave me half the ranch for working hard when I was a kid on the ranch that I grew up on so I had a couple hundred acres and decided it was time to move up there and cut some trees and make some lumber with that. Dad was a rancher but kind of a jack-of-all-trades. He held in California when we moved from Sacramento area he hauled dredged tailings for gravel for driveways, he farmed, he'd melt cows, he had a wrecking yard, hauled and sold a lot of scrap iron, he did everything. You learned a lot from him, I bet. I learned a lot, I learned how to improvise overcoming it at from the time I was eight years old. I mean I was out of bed at six and out doing whatever dad was doing at seven every day until school started looking forward to summer and looking forward to weekends. Your real work ethic? Definitely a work ethic. German, German, that's sweet but I think the German, the stubborn German I think comes out more than anything. You know what my dad said? My dad is 87 and a couple years, no about five years ago I said dad why don't you take this map draw some lines on it go paint some trees and all cut them down and harvest them and do all the hard work. He says damn it I was born to work. I tell you that pretty much sums it up. This just feels rewarding to look behind you and see what you've accomplished for the day especially if you're once you know who you are and why you're doing what you do and the end result and you know the result 50 years from now or more depending on who takes the next step. So it's pretty rewarding work and where I'm going to take you up here show you a one little spot just because I think better in my pickup when I'm driving because I do so much of it kind of shows the kind of work we do that's a little different just harvest replant and go again so we're we're kind of into the ecological world and we see the need for it too and we see the demand for it so we're just trying to make it pay to wait the bills while we do it. Yeah one thing about our world nothing ever stays the same not us and if you're working hard and learning and growing and building a reputation and really digging into your enterprise you know it creates opportunities you have to adapt with the change or not so I think probably I have changed that of course the high tech world has changed the ability to produce more with less people has changed dramatically but maybe at times to the detriment of the environment so we are still leaning a little more towards harvesting where it's a lot more work but the soil the root systems the soil food web the plants don't take such a big hit we do the best we can given meeting all the parameters of the job we may if we had to compete in the industrial logging world we'd probably find it pretty difficult to get work except that people like us I don't know I never look for work it always just finds me and that's I mean I've been every year I worry about not having work and every year I can't quite get it all done okay we have a crew of let's see today I have three contract people there running equipment because it's gonna snow a lot real soon and we won't get that job done and I don't want to let that young couple down so I kind of put getting the job done ahead of profit I mean it'll come back someday one way or the other so I have six guys counting myself five trucks and another contractor with two of his guys there him and two other guys so there's like 12 or 14 people involved in this project today that's big yeah kind of a tough little project that solves steep and everything is uphill to the main road to get out to get off the job what are the other factors that make a job harder or easier quality of the timber the height the size the defect rocky ground steep ground brush there's brush all over this you can't walk it you have to open up all the whole trails with the cat and so you can get where you want to go and look around this knows we have to probably walk our equipment you know two and a half miles an hour or eight or nine miles to get it off the job there's a lot I mean we could talk for days about that you know you know nobody knows your little your little world nobody knows what you bump into all the hurdles you have to cross to put a put a written project together we're the same way there's millions of little idiosyncrasies in our world that tell you're there you never think about well this is a really interesting piece of property we worked on it for probably 20 years on and off Marty Main is the consulting forester and Judd Parsons and the family was the owner well yeah the was the owner Hillcrest Orchards was the owner in the family there's like 40 or 50 voting members some of them as young as five or six years old that vote on decisions on how to run this business Hillcrest Orchards so they voted to sell this property Judd Judd his brother maybe a sister and a nephew bought it back being the leaders that they are and now they're forming a conservation easement on it it's like it's over 2000 acres I believe so Pacific Trust out of San Francisco is putting together a conservation easement for the property and it'll preserve nobody will be able to come in and just annihilate the value out of the resources and leave so it'll always be managed for water for timber for wildlife for all the ecological things for fire but it won't ever be taken advantage of so it's kind of cool I see this I've been watching this process for three years and I think I see that Judd and his three or four siblings are going to come out making just as much money as if they would have harvested the timber for doing the right thing for the right reasons and having the confidence to make a stand and move that direction takes some real leadership to do that because it's a I'm sure I mean I don't know but I'm sure it's in the millions of dollars kind of a deal so tell me what your role is in this you know I am just a worker I'm just labor so Marty recruits us and others but typically we've been involved quite a bit in the harvest of the timber so it's it's got some little challenges wide variety of timber tough roads and it's never a clear cut sometimes it's really thick when we finish sometimes there's a little bit more room between the trees helps us immensely and we never take all the big ones we take a big one or two a day maybe so we harvest a wide variety of age and size and species depending on the conditions the slope the uh the climate change and how fast it's changing etc etc there's a lot of science involved a lot of planning there's a lot of science and a huge amount of planning all the available science and a huge amount of planning so this whole hillside that we've been driving by we've logged you're at Callahan's looking across the freeway you look right at it this time of year with all the black oaks and turning colors or leave her about gone now it's really pretty you can't tell we've been in there Marty always says all things considered I would like to do this so you know he considers every aspect the needs of the owners the needs of the land the changing climate for sure um fire is huge you know the fire equation is a large part of his decisions in his planning especially in key areas um because this property runs over the top of the Mount Ashton Road to the Colson Road and across the Colson Road all the way back almost to Ashland so the way it lays it can be a fire up an opportunity to stop a catastrophic fire that's about the best you can do with fire planning it's an opportunity and so yeah and Marty has a pretty high degree in fire so he understands what he needs to do to make it work you can't fight nature this ground these high elevation mountains grow timber and it's hard to get rid of it always wants to go back to being timber except with the case of fire then it'll be timber and succession grass brush back to timber grass brush back to timber it's just nature's way and the site is suited to do that we logged a little bit right in here last march I think it was a year ago march and what a challenge anyway Marty always makes us work hard and over this of course of this whole property there's hardwood patches there's brush patches there's aspens and wetlands there's some mature trees I mean these trees aren't completely mature but they're considered mature for this day and age they're all every tree here probably is over 100 years old so we have Douglas fir in this stand that one with a witch's broom another one over there that's 170 foot tall tree and then we have ponderosa pines right here so the pines in this area especially this close to hill was was all harvested back in the days when everything was shipped in a wooden box so fruit growers had their own mill and they made wooden boxes and they loved pine especially sugar pine and ponderosa pine so part of our job as we go through these forests is to lean them back towards a more natural state pine ponderosa pine especially susceptible to drought and they're they're going to handle this climate change better than some other species so Marty always protects the pine pushes back to white fir which is a shade tolerant species that comes in underneath the stand that hasn't had fire in years and also manages the dug fir for long term so dug fir ponderosa and sugar pine we always push just because it's a novelty we actually work diligently to protect the black oak sand some white oaks on this property because we want to mix in that that specie as well so we we look for ones that we think will survive and we give them room to grow sun on the south side so pine oaks a little less dug fir push the white fir back and you start to get back more towards a natural system where fire would have entered on a 10 year regime historically at this elevation and and in madrone we see tons of madrone trees these days but historically uh you would see nearly as many because of the little orange pretty little orange bark very thin and very wet and very sys so when we lay out when we when Marty lays out a unit and plans what he wants to do with that unit there is a lot involved the long term end result that's going to benefit society it's kind of yellow and when you cut them they're just it's just waxy and beautiful great wood but i kind of hate cutting a big tree anymore hard work you know that i have two guys that jump over that bank in march in snow and rain and sleet and set chokers they're laying on the ground they're in the brush their faces in the brush it's raining it's wet it's tough and uh so i compete with knife age the labor unions that pay good money have everybody has benefits we have to find good people treat them fairly and still have a profit in the timber left for the landowner and that's a challenge you know timber crop gets amortized out like over probably would be like 80 years so you have to carry three or four percent so it's really not the profit in it that you would think there is if you are honest about the numbers the biggest thing is that people never think about every everything up there is kinetic energy everything up there wants to hit the ground everything over your head by nature wants to fall to the ground and where the we're working there or not it happens so i've had uh and a friend of mine's have had snags fall just for no reason no wind it's just time right close to where you're walking or working and stuff so that's probably falling objects whether we create the incident or nature creates it is probably our biggest risk out here um equipment yeah i i'm after the guys keep seatbelts fast and work within your limits uh things can happen all right but for the most part we're not too bad who i influenced i hope the greatest opportunity is a few people that we influenced in the right direction long term that care i think that's the most power education sharing a passion sharing the knowledge you know i can be i can be pretty influential out here walking through the woods with the right young man you know digging around looking at mushroom sided and then and then i hope did it follow through you did that with your son didn't you i think so i think so they get a little frustrated at times because what we do is so much work but i think they've kind of i think they can see it and that doesn't happen quick to see what's really going on and what has gone on over the last 250 years but once you see it you kind of go oh my gosh so you know after 35 years of just being in the forest i mean i've worked outside since i was a kid i mean like six seven eight i've been outside and always worked outside whether it's construction military logging you just get to where you understand things so well and i one of the things i have become extremely aware of is that i will say something to somebody and they don't have a clue about what i just said even though it's in plain english they don't see it they don't understand it they don't know what's going on all around them all the time so i kind of see the whole world getting themselves into a corner really with the climate change issue because they don't see the hotter days they don't see the trees dying the change in the forest like i see and the accentuating curve that's happening in the forest over the last 20 years they don't see it they just jump in their car and turn on the air conditioning go home turn on the air conditioning just enjoy life so that has me a little concern for like my grandkids as kids or something to that effect you have to observe and especially like with my sheep sometimes i'll just go sit right in the middle of them and just watch to see what they're doing how what they're eating how they're eating it how they feel you know and the same thing in the forest too you just have to really stop and think about it a while you have to take time to evaluate and then it all comes to light well not all it's a never-ending learning process but it sure is fun