Assessment

* LOGGING IN THE SIERRA NEVADA

Management Strategies

* Implementing SNEP Forest Strategies

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The logging of the Sierra Nevada took place in several stages. The gold rush created an immediate demand for mining timbers and lumber for construction of towns. Large sugar pines were cut down for shakes. This was a time of small sawmills that moved frequently as timber nearby was exhausted. Logging and lumber transport was by ox team and horses. As the placers gave out, this form of logging continued at a slower pace until the Central Pacific Railroad was built across the Sierra in 186568. The railroad ushered in industrial logging with its own construction followed by logging of the Tahoe-Truckee Basin, from which huge amounts of timber and wood were removed for the Comstock Mines. The construction of the railroad up and down the Central Valley offered an opportunity for industrial logging of the Sierra. The industry expanded, using new methods developed in the Tahoe Basin, such as V flumes, chutes, and inclines, and later donkey engines and logging railroads. Expansion was aided by land disposal laws that favored development of large timber holdings. In 1890 and 1891 national parks were created and the forest reserves were authorized, yet millions of acres of Sierra timberlands were still being disposed of through 1905. In a 1902 U.S. Geological Report for the Northern Sierra, John Leiberg estimated that 44% of the areas he examined at the turn of the century had been logged. He noted a large proportion of the remaining forest (30%) is on places inaccessible and will never be available for use. The U.S. Forest Service, created in 1905, began making timber sales soon after, but they were not a major factor in wood supply until World War II. The period after 1900 was the heyday of the logging railroad and high-speed cable yarder. This form of logging flourished until the mid-1920s, when tractor-truck logging began to increase. Markets continued to be mainly in California, where the major uses of lumber were for fruit packing boxes and for home building caused by rapid population growth. After a slowdown during the 1930s, logging in the Sierra picked up rapidly during World War II. Acquistions of private forestland by the Forest Service beginning in the depression years added hundreds of thousands of acres of cutover, partially cut, and understocked lands to the national forests. But it was the postwar population and building booms in California that caused the rapid expansion of logging in the Sierra. As a result of higher prices and great demand many private ownerships, small and large, were cutover and the national forests rose in the timber market. Production from national forests in California rose to a peak of 2 billion board feet by the late 1970s, about half from the Sierra Nevada forests. Since that time logging has steadily declined as public lands were set aside for wilderness, wildlife habitat, watershed protection, and other uses. Logging on private lands has also been impacted, first by a more comprehensive forest practices act in 1973, and later by sharp declines in national forest timber available for logging. Because of high prices resulting from short supplies of timber, much of the timber on small ownerships was cut during the late 1980s and early 1990s.