Bench Felling at Glengarry Forest 1981
This video was made by Graham Whistler for Jim Pratt who was Harvesting Head Forester at Inchnacardoch at the time in 1981. The video appears at the bottom of this text.
The process of felling the every steep forest covered slopes above Loch Oich was progressing and ways to improve worker safety, speed of operation and minimise disruption to users of the public road at the bottom were being developed.
This video clip, part of a few that will cover all the operations, shows Rick Hayes (Forester with Training Branch?) developing the ‘bench’ method of felling in Invergarry Forest (Not Inchnacardoch as mentioned above). There are some very good views of the Great Glen valley bottom far below.
The bench felling system on these steep slopes involved leaving stopper trees standing at the bottom of a felling strip, felling a couple of large ‘bench’ trees down hill towards them and then felling the rest of the trees across the two bench trees. Once a tree was felled across the slope on to the two bench trees it remained in place due to all the branches and also very often the felling hinge was not cut at the butt end until after the tree was sned (branches removed). After the trees were sned they were then rolled easily down to the stopper trees especially if the felling hinge was cut. The piled up trees would then be extracted whole by cable crane.
The advantages of this method was the easy removal of branches all round the stem as the tree was raised at a convenient height and the feller worked more easily back and fore across slope. The cut branches fell down to the ground where they were sned and once the tree was rolled down to the stopper tree pile they were clear of all the branch wood debris. When extracting by cable crane there was little branch wood to hide the attachment points of the cut trees and as they were all lying in one direction this made pick up by the cable crane operators much simpler.
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