Today I was again working at the mill - but this time not with the computers, but in their forest. Storm winds have been felling some trees in their forest, and the modern sawmills aren't interested in storm-felled trees. So I thought maybe I could use some of them. I used a chainsaw to cut the branches and to trim the trunks to 4m logs. I had packed a portable stove, canned pea-soup and instant coffee so that I could have a lunch break in the forest.
Picture album:
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How do you skid them back to your house? Do you have a rig you can use with your horses?
Around here, most of the flat places are farmland, so all the logging is done on steep mountainsides. I can recall several times skidding logs off the mountain with farm equipment that I thought I was going to get pulled down the mountainside and die, lol.
How to operate farm equipment on steep mountainsides - I think that goes into the category of local, practical knowledge one learns by experience. I mean, I always find it so fascinating how people living in different surroundings develop specific local skills to cope with their environment.
Well, hehe, while I was having my lunch break I thought that this would be exactly the kind of work I originally wanted to have a horse for. It would be practically possible to load the logs on a sleigh and draw them with a horse. But since my first horse died, and I've been so irregular and non-systematic with training Raiku, so at the moment I don't have a horse who would be familiar with this kind of work. (Especially if one is working alone, the more the horse needs to know what to do. Like, when to stand still while the human is moving things behind the horse's back, and when to start dragging. And how to handle the weight of the loaded sleigh in up- and down-hills.)
My friend running the mill said that they can handle the transportation with their farm equipment. I think they even have a hydraulic arm which can be used to load heavy logs.
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