Early winter glading

Since the snow had completely melted off it made sense to do some more glade cutting.  The bottom half of the hill didn't have any glades yet (which meant you had to ski the tow line instead).  We wanted to open it up quite a bit on the lower slopes to get skiers away from the tow line.  By cutting only pin cherries, striped maple and crowded beech sapplings it worked out fairly well with mostly yellow birch and sugar maples remaining.

Here are the new glades near the bottom of the tow.

From the same spot looking up at the tow line.

At first I was creating little islands untouched from any cutting but the striped maple and pin cherrys were crowding out trees with more timber value (such as yellow birch).  Because of that I ended up weeding out some of the unwanted saplings everywhere.

I'm looking forward to watching the forest mature and establish a larger upper canopy on the lower slopes.

Here is an old logging road.