Harvesting timber from steep terrain in our newly acquired Bells block presented significant challenges for our Roxburgh 2 crew, demanding specialised techniques and equipment.
The access track to the stand is steep, with a maximum gradient of 20%, and cannot be re-graded due to the native vegetation that it cuts through.
To navigate these constraints, Off Road Log Haulage Ltd was brought in to extract the logs from the block.
The stand itself is also steep, making logging very technical. The back face of the block requires skidders to pull logs up to 500 metres to a temporary crossing at the bottom of the gully, enabling the crew to extract trees from behind a significant strip of native vegetation.
Once the stems are dropped at the crossing, they are pulled across and up the adjacent hill face with the Harvestline cable logging system.
Due to the track’s steepness at that point, making it unsuitable for off-road trucks, an additional 100- to 200-metre pull with a second skidder is required to reach the processing site. Stems were processed, fleeted and stencilled before being loaded onto off-road logging trucks.
The final leg involves transporting the logs over a 1.4km route from the processing site to the load-out area at the top of the hill, where they are stacked or loaded straight onto conventional log trucks for dispatch from the forest.