Logging Giant Redwood Trees: “Redwood Saga” 1946; How Trees Were Logged in Northern California

Forestry, Logging, Wood, Lumber, Sawmills, Lumberjacks… playlist:

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“Cutting, loading, transportation, mill sawing and finishing operations of the Northern California’s redwood lumber industry.”

Reupload of a previously uploaded film with improved video & sound.

Public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

Logging in the Californian Sierra Nevada arose from the need to support growing communities in the area. The Gold Rush created a high demand for timber to build housing, for mining procedures, and especially to build railroads. In these days use was unregulated and in the first 20 years after the rush, a third of the timber in the Sierra Nevada was logged . Concern for the forests created a movement towards conservation at the turn of the 19th century creating state and national parks (Yosemite, Sequoia and Grant Grove) and forest reserves. The Sierra Club, a non-governmental organization (NGO), was founded around this time by the famous preservationist John Muir. Between 1900 and 1940 agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and The National Park Service regulated the use of the Sierra Nevada’s resources. The economy boom after World War II dramatically increased timber production in the Sierras using clear-cutting as the dominant form of logging.

Methods

One method of logging is clear-cutting, removing all trees from a tract of land, which has caused major disturbances in the Sierra Nevada environment leaving patches of densely packed, single-specie, same-aged, tree plantations among the diverse old growth forest. Low-impact logging meets current needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. This typically means smaller periodic harvests and removing the worst trees to eliminate danger to high value trees…

Environmental effects

Logging practices have altered the majority of the native forests, transforming them into simplified forests of same-aged trees with a reduced ecological resilience[citation needed]. These disturbed stands are especially prone to catastrophic fire and mortality due to beetle infestation and disease. It has also caused fragmentation and increased edge effect, along with releasing pesticides and chemicals into the water and land. In the Sierra’s there are 218 endemic plant species that are considered rare or threatened, and three plant species are believed to be extinct. Sixty-nine terrestrial vertebrate species are considered at risk by government agencies…

Sequoia sempervirens is the sole living species of the genus Sequoia in the cypress family Cupressaceae (formerly treated in Taxodiaceae). Common names include coast redwood, California redwood, and giant redwood. It is an evergreen, long-lived, monoecious tree living 1200–1800 years or more. This species includes the tallest trees on Earth, reaching up to 379 feet (115.5 m) in height (without the roots) and up to 26 feet (7.9 m) in diameter at breast height. Before commercial logging and clearing began by the 1850s, this massive tree occurred naturally in an estimated 2,100,000 acres (8,500 km2) along much of coastal California (excluding southern California where rainfall is not sufficient) and the southwestern corner of coastal Oregon within the United States. It is estimated that more than 95% of the original old-growth redwood forest has been cut down, due to its excellent properties for use as lumber in construction.

The name sequoia sometimes refers to the subfamily Sequoioideae, which includes S. sempervirens along with Sequoiadendron (giant sequoia) and Metasequoia (dawn redwood). On its own, the term redwood usually refers to the coast redwood, which is covered in this article, and not to the other two species…

Although coast redwoods are currently the world’s tallest trees, it is possible that Australian mountain ash and Douglas-fir trees were taller—exceeding 400 feet (120 m)—before the commercial logging of the 19th and 20th centuries…

There is fairly solid evidence that before logging, coast redwoods were the world’s largest trees, with specimens measured at over 55,000 cubic feet (1,600 m3) (660,000 board feet)…