Abused Oddly-Shaped Parcel Located Close to Big Mountain, Looking for Good Time
Abused Oddly-Shaped Parcel Located Close to Big Mountain, Looking for Good Time
How I view the woods
If my land could write, this would be their personal ad:
Abused Oddly-Shaped Parcel Located Close to Big Mountain, Looking for Good Time
I'm a 35-acre parcel located at 1500'. I'm generally 10 degrees cooler than the flat lands. I am full of rocks and water. Stick a shovel in me just about anywhere, and you'll hit a rock! If you get past that rock, you'll eventually find water in the form of an underground stream. I'm full of surprises! And trees- many types, especially beech! I contain no flat ground. All of my surfaces are sloped and kind of kinky ;)
Affirmation
As a kid, the forest provided peace: a cold stone from a shaded stream held in the palm of my hand, a scratchy pine branch broke off the stout trunk of a suburban tree used to whack other trees, the smell of the dirt where trees grow, realized after a period of digging. Why was I digging? I had no idea, but I was ten, and sometimes, digging and breaking branches for no reason made sense. The woods absorbed my energy.
Love for the woods
A sequential oversimplified list of the geographies I’ve inhabited:
Suburbia
City
Valley
Woods
Ten years ago, I moved from the Champlain Valley of Vermont, where the temperatures are milder than the rest of the state and where the farming is most productive, to the side of VT's tallest mountain, Mt. Mansfield. There are no roads between me and the summit, and my northeast property boundary is Mt. Mansfield State Forest. The forest composition is northern hardwoods: maple, beech, yellow birch, white ash, cherry, and basswood.
Vermont’s forests have been harvested for a couple of hundred years. First cleared for farming, potash, and timber, sheep likely grazed this land in 1840, and it was completely devoid of trees.
Old stone walls remain, as do pieces of barbed wire consumed by the trees’ growth rings.
When the sheep left because of Western states' competitive advantage in wool production, trees grew back, and the forest was probably cut down and grazed a few more times. Large landowners began to chop up and sell once Interstates 89 and 91 were built in the 1960s. Property lines were established and formalized; the foundation for a new Vermont was complete.
High-Grading
My parcel was last logged around 1990. It wasn’t clearcut but “high-graded”; this is when only the premium, most valuable trees are harvested, leaving the lesser-quality specimens.
Soon after we moved here, I began working in the woods. First to acquire firewood. Next, to do Forest Stand Improvement (also known as Timber Stand Improvement). This involves thinning trees and releasing crop trees as a way to accelerate the growth of marketable timber and improve overall forest health. My forester marked the trees to be cut with blue paint, and I cut them over three winters. After ten years, I’ve taken the following from the woods within our property lines:
50 cords of firewood (primarily for home heating, but some for maple syrup production)
30 gallons of maple syrup
four hand-carved spoons
one hand-carved bowl
Two deer
One bear
These products hold tremendous value to me. When the hunting season ends in December, it's the beginning of chainsawing season in my mind. Roaming the woods with a chainsaw, hiking over uneven ground, struggling to pull down a snag: this is great exercise and a replacement for therapy when cabin fever would otherwise consume me. Throwing a log on the fire in late January is gratifying. I've touched that log nine times to get it in my woodstove:
Cut down tree
Drag tree out
Buck up the tree
Split the round
Load in tractor
Stack in shed
Stack in the tractor again to bring to the house after the wood’s seasoned
Unstack into house wood holder
Take from wood holder, burn
There are times when I grab a log and know the exact tree it originated from because of a mark on its bark, the smoothness of its grain, or the gnarly, stringy fibers that gave me trouble when splitting.
The State of Vermont’s approach to forest management is frustrating if you care about wildlife habitat. There isn't much pressure to log on state lands, which results in a lot of the forest being left alone. You may think this is good at first: let it be wild, get bigger, save the trees, etc. I get it.
The problem with this let-it-be approach is that humans have managed this forest actively for a couple of hundred years, so stepping away now results in an imbalance between the forest and wildlife. I see an unhealthy deer population without access to quality habitat. Hence, another activity I'm undertaking is the creation of wildlife habitat. The Forest Stand Improvement work helps, and I've also created mini clear-cuts throughout the property. In these spots, I hinge-cut trees and plant apple, pear, and oak trees.
These forest-based activities are valuable to me, but if I apply the hard calculus of the economic system we are situated within, these activities are valueless. Even with a chainsaw and tractor, my firewood operation is inefficient compared to a logger with a skidder and firewood processor. The hand-carved bowls and spoons I make require so many hours to make no one would ever be willing to buy them:
Making a bowl: From tree…to log…to bowl:
20 hours hours labor
X
$15/hour
= $300
Forest Fragmentation
Forest fragmentation occurs when large chunks of previously intact forest are divided by building development. Technically, all of Vermont’s forests were fragmented a couple of hundred years ago by sheep farming. These pastures, however, left fallow, turn back to forest within a decade. Subdivisions, exurban development, and McMansions don’t revert to forest as easily.
Vermont’s woods are mostly privately owned, so they're fair game for development (assuming local and zoning requirements are satisfied). Again, development ranks very high if we seek the highest and best use of land from an economic value standpoint. My firewood, spoons, and wildlife harvests can't compete with a five-unit subdivision. The pressure on landowners to develop land is high, especially if you're land-rich but cash-poor. This is a tale as old as the interstate tentacles that grew from New York and Boston.
Where the government does not own the land, land trusts, like VT Land Trust, conserve land perpetually for the public. Post-pandemic, housing demand and housing prices are at record highs. Incentives to develop land have never been greater.
Stepping onto the logging road, I'm immediately in the shade offered by sugar maples: nature's air conditioning. It's June and 90°, and I hear a backhoe's backup warning beep and a dog's bark, both about a half mile away. A new driveway that weaves its way not closer to the mountain but closer to a view of the mountain, where this place, this forest, these woods can be taken in from the comfort of an air-conditioned living room.
As this place becomes more urbanized, both geographically and culturally, the manner in which the woods are used is changing. The woods are a place to subdivide, to look at, and to leave alone.
To use them, extract timber from them, to hunt in them, to cut down, is scary to a lot of people. They want to leave the trees alone— don't hunt, don't cut. The woods are a museum, there for our enjoyment, for the view and recreating. Deciphering these changing priorities is messy, neither black nor white, mostly grey.
What will happen to the Woods?
The city is in the country, especially in areas with a fast internet connection. Geography is important but no longer the limiting factor. Boston, New York, Burlington, Rutland, St. Albans, St. Johnsbury, and White River Junction will all keep expanding, suburb upon fragmented suburb. But so will smaller pockets, city islands in the middle of "nowhere”; where a broadband-tethered house is built in the middle of a forest. That describes my house almost perfectly, so I don’t criticize anyone for wanting that.
It is in this messy conceptual space that my woods occupy. Is the forest a museum or workshop? Or a subdivision? What's the highest and best use? The value? How would I feel about seeing a four-bedroom monstrosity constructed on the trail my kids and I built during the dark days of the pandemic? It's a similar feeling to how I’d feel if I could no longer pick up that gnarly yellow birch firewood from a tree I cut down and throw on the wood stove. There's value to these feelings. More economic value than a subdivision? Certainly not. Yet I'm still carving spoons, getting firewood, and making better deer habitat despite this. Is it logical? No. But I'll keep doing it.
By far, the best place I've lived is in the woods.
About Next Adventure Subscriptions
I appreciate both free and paid subscribers. There are currently no paywalls. Free and paid subscribers get access to the latest newsletter and publication archives. These are free from the distractions of spam and advertisements.
Free Subscribers = Passive Support of this writing
Paid Subscribers = Active Support of this writing
Great article Jesse! Your love of the land is obvious. Out here in Colorado we're seeing the same kind of development -- our population is exploding and everyone wants a view of the mountains.
Jesse, This is a good piece for me to read. My land is so much like yours, just not quite as high up towards the mountain. Over the years, some friends from Grand Isle have come and harvested some trees, leaving me with firewood and taking some for themselves . Now they (and I of course) are more aged. Brendan Haynes has done some cutting for me. We have all been careful to leave brush piles for wildlife, cut to thin and leave sunlight for other trees etc. but we are not experts.
Ethan Tapper walked the woods with me years ago but did not paint any trees that could go; would it be a good idea to have him come again??