Author: Alexandra Dolk

Last spring, Paul Hansen and his 16-year-old granddaughter found themselves tromping through his forest near Mount Rainier (Tahoma), in Washington. Both were searching for old PVC pipe remnants and rebar stakes hammered into the ground, but their motives that day were split. Paul was hoping to find the centers of circular plots he’d marked out 10 years prior in order to do regular inventory of his young forest near Eatonville, Washington. His granddaughter was hoping to spend some time with granddad…and take home the promised $50 bribe in exchange for the inventory assistance. While GPS coordinates helped guide them to the

2023 is fast approaching, and we’re eager as beavers in a wetland forest to start some of the new projects we have planned. But before we start construction on our next lodge (so to speak), we’d like to take a moment to reflect on some of NNRG’s most notable achievements and activities of 2022.   1. Monitoring shows the value of snow gaps at the Nisqually Community Forest climate adaptation project In winter 2021-2022, we completed our first season of snow monitoring at our climate adaptation project near Ashford, WA. Forestry techniques like thinning and gap cuts are sometimes recommended

Forest owners looking for ways to profit off of their forests sometimes turn to producing non-timber forest products, or NTFPs. Some lease salal harvesting rights to greens companies; others make and sell evergreen wreaths made from cut boughs. One member of NNRG’s group’s FSC® certificate has created a successful business out of a less conventional NTFP: renting out a uniquely luxurious treehouse deep in their woods. Sean, who stewards a 200-acre forest in southern Oregon with his parents, built this treehouse with the help of a few friends. He grew up building treehouses, so designing and constructing this large treehouse to rent

Planning what happens to your land after you pass on is a critical part of good forest stewardship. If you don’t plan to sell your land or pass it on to another family member, you’ll need to figure out not just how it will be managed in the future, but who will manage it. That involves a lot of decisions, and likely a lot of outside help. But even if you do plan to leave the land to your kids or other family members, don’t assume that transition will happen smoothly on its own.

Nestled on the edge of the Olympic Peninsula about halfway down Hood Canal, Camp Robbinswold includes 570 acres of young, older, and mixed-age forest that is Forest Stewardship Council® certified through NNRG’s FSC® group certificate. The camp property includes 1.5 miles of shoreline and tidelands, a 10-acre freshwater lake, 350 acres of forest managed for sustainable timber production, and 220 acres of forest set aside for conservation.  For nearly 100 years, Camp Robbinswold has drawn campers from western Washington (and far beyond), who explore the camp’s shores and forests whilst learning leadership skills, practicing outdoor recreation basics, expanding their ecological

It’s that classic love story: boy meets girl, boy buys forest, girl marries boy, boy plants 100,000 trees. Okay, not classic, exactly, but sweet, definitely.  When Fred Beazell bought over 500 acres of former farmland near Corvallis in the early sixties, he had dreams of living on the land with his long-time sweetweart, Dolores Anthony. The couple married a few years later, but for decades continued to live in Silicon Valley, where they both worked in tech. Still, Fred made frequent weekend trips to the land and found immense joy in digging holes and planting seedlings – over 100,000 of

RESOURCES FOR IDENTIFYING AND CONTROLLING FLORA NON GRATA IN YOUR WOODLANDS Invasive plants such as the ones listed on this page can damage natural resources. They can quickly erode biodiversity in woodlands and reduce wildlife habitat by overtaking and toppling trees, eroding streambanks, crowding out and shading out native plant species, and even changing soil chemistry. On this page we’ve compiled some resources for woodland owners dealing with invasive species. There are many more resources out there, particularly through university extension service websites like this one from WSU Extension.   An ounce of prevention… Figuring out how to deal with

Around 200 people call Shaw Island home, among them Lynn Bahrych, formerly a Commissioner for the Washington State Conservation Commission and co-chair of the Washington State Soil Health Committee. Lynn is steward and owner of Osprey Pond, a 64-acre forest and wildlife pond on the northwestern end of the island. With financial support from the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), Lynn has embarked on a project to transform her tinderbox “wall of trees” into a fire- and climate-resilient forest that more closely resembles the natural, fire-adapted forest of millennia past.

For forest owners who have been stewarding their forests for a longer time, the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) may be a convenient additional source of funding for ongoing stewardship activities. This article explains what CSP can fund, and who can apply.

NNRG recently facilitated a unique harvest at Nisqually Community Forest, a community-owned and community-managed forest at the foothills of Mount Rainier.  The Community Forest is the site of a project that is testing the effects of thinning to different densities on a stand’s ability to adapt to the hotter, drier climate of the future. In November, a thinning crew hand-felled small-diameter trees to create more room for the remaining trees to grow and reduce competition for water and nutrients. A member of the thinning crew hand fells a fir in a thick patch of forest that’s being used in a

A forester walks into the woods carrying diameter tape, an increment borer, and a GPS… No, it’s not the opening to a joke or a riddle — it’s the start of a typical workday in the field for an NNRG foresters, who never leave home without a few important pieces of forestry gear. Several of these items are readily accessible at your local forestry and farm suppliers and could be gear staples for landowners who monitor or inventory their forest. Read on to learn a bit more about what our foresters are carrying around while they’re working in the woods

For compelling holiday reading, start here. We asked NNRG staff to send over their top book recommendations in the forestry/ecology genre. The list includes fiction and non-fiction, classics and new hits.  NNRG Director of Programs Rowan recommends: Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe by Charlotte Gill Gill uses stories about the many seasons she spent planting trees in British Columbia to dig into the history, science, and economics of tree planting. At the same time, she includes some beautiful descriptions of Cascadia ecology that will be familiar to many of our members. A good read

Nothing typifies the beautiful San Juan Islands more than the peeling, tri-color branches of a madrone snaking through a canopy.