Today we did some timber cruising with a private timber company. They do a lot of logging and carbon sequestering (storing of carbon). The stored carbon credit is sold to people, some of them being high profile celebrities, to offset their environmental impact. Apparently, this timber company makes more money off carbon sequestering than timber harvests these days.
We had to drive through an old coal mining area to get to our site. I could look around and see the mountain tops removed to access coal. The mining company had a security guard on site 24/7, even though it had been shut down for over 5 years. Something seemed out of place.
We got to the site and had to tromp through 5+ inches of snow and cross through a creek to reach out site. We did not cross over the creek; we went straight through it. We quickly found a spot where the water was no deeper than 8 inches and ran through the water. Then we hiked uphill over the downed trees. By the time we got to the plot, my pants were soaked almost all the way up to my knees. Luckily, we had a high of 30* and the pants were frozen over instead of dripping wet. Working with the timber industry isn't ajoke.
When we got to our plot, we had to find a piece of rebar which indicates the center. It is a circle plot with a radius of about 38 feet. We measured and identified all the trees in the plot. Then we inputted the data into a spreadsheet so someone else can do a bunch of math and compare it to other surveys to produce a number representing the amount of carbon sequestered in the time frame for that forest.
It is quite a trip to see how the industry has changed. They used to pay people to cut the tops off mountains to harvest profitable material; now they pay someone to grow profitable material to leave it there. It is nice to see this hard work going into preserving the land.
