Hi! My name is Griffin.
I am one of the new interns here at Starker Forests. I am about to enter my senior year at Oregon State in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree in Forest Engineering. My past work experiences have been mostly in farming and road maintenance, so all the forestry experience I’ve had so far this summer is new. I am very excited to see where this summer goes!
On Monday, the Starker interns set out to cruise without any supervision from Fred and Lys. We split into pairs and tackled the majority of a new stand that Starker bought in the last couple years. So far, our cruising experience has been in post-thinned large timber and pre-thinned timber. This new stand we worked on was only 20 years old, so it was a fight against very dense, low canopies all day.
The change in size/age/density is a good challenge for us to expand our cruising experience. The changes in heights, diameters, crown sizes and density is great to see so we can learn. We still have a day’s worth of work left out there, but I am ready to go back and finish what we started!
I just got my first pair of corks, so it’s been a heck of last few days trekkin’ around in brand new boots! Cork boots are great for hiking in the woods due to their spikes on the bottom of the boot that make it easy to scale steep slopes and fallen timber!
– Griffin Puls