He's reminded of that fact every time he stops to look at the pile of logs stacked up next to the road in South Gash Creek.
The butt ends of the ponderosa pines are already marked a telltale blue from a fungus carried on the backs of bark beetles. If he looks a little closer, Rall can see the tiny tunnels of wood borer insects in still other species of trees.
The second-generation logger knows his financial margin on this small salvage timber sale is already razor thin because of the nation's economic downturn and a stalled housing market.
And if that's not enough to worry about, there's all this snow.
Over the last few years, there wouldn't have been enough to slow down a logging operation like this one. But this year, the snow is piled deep enough to cause Rall to hire a couple of extra hands to dig the stuff away from the base of trees for his sawyer.
“It's up to here sometimes,” said Rall, holding his hand clear up to his chest. “It's hard enough finding help. No one wants to do this anymore and the snow runs them off.”
Rall's nine-man crew has been working for better than a month on the Gash Fire Salvage and Reforestation Project on the Bitterroot National Forest.
Some of the logs will end up at Seeley Lake's Pyramid Mountain Lumber Co. mill. Others are slated for Stimson Lumber in Bonner, but Rall's not sure how that's going to work since the mill recently announced it would shut down for a spell.
The rest will end up as house logs or maybe beams. The worst of the bunch will become firewood.
The key for making it all work is timing.
It won't be long before the days warm and the snow starts to melt. Once spring breakup begins, Rall will have to wait until the ground dries.
“We want to finish getting everything out this winter that we can,” he said. “But who would have known that we were going to get all this?”
The Gash Creek fire started just west of Victor in July 2006, and poured smoke into the valley for the better part of two months as it burned through about 8,500 acres of mostly national forest land. More than a third of the acreage burned hot enough for the U.S. Forest Service to call it a moderate- to high-severity fire.
When Stevensville District Ranger Dan Ritter started considering a salvage timber sale, he knew early on that he'd have to streamline the process to have any hope of capturing economic value from the burned timber.
In order to do that, he'd make use of a categorical exclusion clause that allows for salvage sales under 250 acres and with less than a quarter-mile of road to be completed without lengthy environmental documentation.
He decided on a 188-acre salvage timber operation that would capture some of value of the trees to support the local timber industry. The proposal also included a provision that trees would be planted on 462 acres after the timber harvest was completed.
“We knew there wasn't a lot of value in those trees already,” Ritter said. “This salvage sale was strictly to provide wood products for local industry. With the market depressed, we didn't get a whole lot of interest in the sale.”
Two environmental organizations - Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Friends of the Bitterroot - appealed the proposal in an 81-page document. The agency upheld Ritter's decision.
After the first buyer backed out because he couldn't make the numbers work, Rall purchased the sale. His crews started working in December to begin moving the timber down to his log yard near Bell Crossing.
While the deep snow creates some headaches for Rall, it's perfect for protecting the soil.
“From a soil damage standpoint, the conditions couldn't be much better,” Ritter said. “Not only is the ground frozen solid, we have lots of snow for the equipment to ride over.”
Come spring, other than lots of new tree stumps, Ritter said it will hard to see where Rall's equipment has ventured.
Rall said the snow does make his work more difficult, but there's an upside.
“We have a lot less erosion work to do in the winter,” Rall said. “I may spend a little more money on fighting with the snow, but I save money by not having to do so much erosion work.”
At least once a week, Bitterroot National Forest timber sale administrator Pat McKinnon visits the site to ensure that loggers are following the contract's guidelines.
Forest Service employees marked with orange paint the trees they wanted left on the site. That includes at least four larger dead snags for wildlife and the trees that agency folk deemed likely to live following the fire.
“With the hot and dry summer that we had last year, I think it's going to be interesting to go back and see just how many of those trees did survive,” McKinnon said. “We try to make those decisions on which trees will live based on how much green is left in the crown and how much of the bowl of the tree was scorched.”
It's an admittedly imperfect science.
McKinnon recently checked a larch tree that had been marked with orange paint. Just underneath the bark, he found the important living cambium was no longer green. The tree had died.
Walking up the snow-covered road, McKinnon stopped to look out over a cutting unit. He pointed out the pockets of green trees here and there that will be left behind.
“Twenty years ago, we would have clearcut this,” he said. “We don't do that much anymore.”
Reporter Perry Backus can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at pbackus@missoulian.com
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