Horses used for low impact logging

GRANTS PASS, Ore. - "Hup. Hup. Hup," yelled Nick Rodgers, hanging on to ropes attached to his Belgian workhorse Maggie, who strained up a hill pulling a several-hundred pound log. "That's a lot of horsepower," said Vince Randall, Bureau of Land Management forester, overseeing logging of bug-infested trees at Cathedral Hills Park south of Grants Pass. Rodgers and his nephew, Bennett Rodgers, horse loggers from Butte Falls, hope to get three or more truckloads of saleable timber out of the project. They consider any job with at least a truckload worthy of their time, with the current high timber prices. The 400-acre park with 10 miles of trails for horses, hikers and bicyclists is a perfect place for logging with horses, which use a lighter touch than bulldozers and cables and are quieter. "We could have done it faster with mechanized equipment, but because of the situation here it's kind of set up for horses," Randall said. In fact, the BLM would like to revive horse logging to some degree, Randall said. The Rodgers already took out close to 700 hundred trees around campgrounds at Howard Prairie and Hyatt reservoirs east of Ashland earlier this year. The BLM hadn't done a contract with horse loggers in more than three decades before that, Randall said...MORE