SHAW’S WIRE ROPES FOREST FOCUS
Mike Hurring had a secret weapon up his sleeve when he tendered to harvest the entire Douglas-fir forest on the lower slopes of the famous Coronet Peak ski field – a lightweight and compact European tower hauler that makes an ideal tool for dragging in trees from steep and difficult country.
MUCH AS WE ALL LOVE OUR FORESTS, THERE ARE places in New Zealand where plantation trees currently just don’t belong. Take Central Otago. Anyone who has visited Queenstown in recent years can’t fail to have noticed the wilding pines sprouting up among the native flora.
Wilding pines have become such a scourge that it’s now costing millions to eradicate them each year to ensure they don’t infest our beloved natural high country any further.
Douglas-fir, in particular, loves the Otago climatic and soil conditions because it’s very much like their natural habitat in Canada. But in recognising the problem, we should resist any notions of banning exotic pine plantations from these areas.
As local authorities, the Department of Conservation and landowners fight the infestations, there is light at the end of the tunnel because scientists at Scion have already bred pines that do not produce seeds, thanks to genetic editing technology.
However, current laws do not allow for commercialisation of such technology and the government needs to urgently review the legislation so that we have the option of being able to plant pines across the country in the future without the risk of seeding natural habitats. That means taking on the powerful green lobby, which doesn’t want a bar of anything that smacks of genetics. My advice to our lawmakers; ignore the dogma and follow the science – just like we’ve done with COVID-19.
In the meantime, the fight against wildings goes on. And loggers are pitching in to help win the battle.
Queenstown Lakes District Council has enlisted a logging contractor to harvest the entire Douglas-fir forest on the lower slopes of the famous Coronet Peak ski field in order to prevent those trees spreading any more seeds.
It was a somewhat controversial decision because the 172ha Coronet Forest was only established as a joint venture by QLDC and Central Otago District Council between 1984 and 1996 as a longterm revenue producer, so most of the trees have not yet reached their designated harvestable age and by removing them early, the ratepayers are being denied a chunk of future profits. But leaving the trees to grow on and continue to spread their seeds would certainly have created more costly and unsightly problems in the future.
Once Coronet Forest is gone, the council will undertake a substantially large (to be confirmed in the long-term plan later this year) native tree and shrub planting programme to restore the land to its former natural glory.
A secret weapon
The job of removing the Douglas-fir has fallen to Mike Hurring Logging from Balclutha, after being put out to tender.
It’s not a straightforward harvesting task. The slopes are very
SERIOUS POWER FOR BIG TIME LOGGERS steep in places and fragile. Part of the forest is planted on a 14 million-year-old slip that also needs to be managed carefully,
requiring minimal disturbance to the surface. And then there is the climate, which gets very cold and icy during winter when the south-facing slopes receive no sun.
But Mike Hurring had a secret weapon up his sleeve when he tendered for the work; a lightweight and compact European tower hauler that makes an ideal tool for dragging in trees from steep and difficult country.
Three years ago he acquired the first – and so far only – Austrian-built Koller 40-foot tower in New Zealand to put to work in woodlots around Otago.
Long-time readers may remember that NZ Logger magazine featured the Koller when it was the subject of a Future Forest Research project carried out on the East Coast, north of Gisborne six years ago. The Koller had been imported by Swiss businessman, Christian Welte, to harvest trees on his land as part of an effort to introduce more sophisticated European technology to logging in New Zealand.
Unfortunately, the large East Coast trees proved to be too heavy and cumbersome for the Koller and it was sent south to Nelson for some lighter contract work before Mike Hurring bought it in 2018.
“When this job came up for tender it really appealed to me, knowing that we had the Koller and it was a good fit for this job, so that’s why I went pretty hard after it,” says Mike.
“Originally the job was to be split into three parts, the roading, harvesting and cartage. We put in for the whole lot as one contract. Much more cost-effective for a job like this. We got the job because they said it wasn’t necessarily on price but through the way we were able to carry it out and the fact that we had all the health and safety systems in place and the gear to match.”
As it turns out, there’s a lot of gear for a relatively small contract. When NZ Logger visited the site last month the complement of machinery on hand not only included the Koller tower but also a pair of processors, a forwarder, skidder, feller/buncher, winch-assist base machine, grapple loader, bulldozer, dump truck, grader and more. Serious stuff.
There’s a good reason for throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, at a job like this, explains foreman Adrian Gillions. The complexity of the terrain and highly changeable climatic conditions means that you need a big toolbox from which to pluck the right tools for specific parts of the job. Otherwise, you risk falling behind your target and running into red ink.
“It’s a very challenging environment,” says Adrian. “The ground conditions make for tough going – there is no bedrock, it’s all shist and very soft silty soil. Very powdery in hot sun and it turns to clag in the wet. So getting roads bedded in and hard, we’ve had to bring in a lot of rock to do that.”
They also leaned on some local knowledge and support when setting up the job. While the Hurring team upgraded the council road leading into the forest, Wanaka-based contractor Dave Collett was contracted to build the tracks and pads across the remainder of the site, using his experience and intimate knowledge of the local conditions.
Much of that work was carried out just before COVID-19 hit last year, with harvesting getting back under way just as winter hit. In spite of that interruption, the Hurring crew has managed to keep to schedule and within a year it had already cleared one-third of Coronet Forest, thanks to a clear plan of attack.
“When we started the job we put in two skid sites by the gate to get us underway and cleared an area two tree lengths around those sites,” says Adrian.
“Now we are around the back of the forest we are going to bring this block home with us. We’re working the highest top point over the summer and coming back down to here (the main skid site halfway up the hill) heading into the winter months.
“We can harvest year-round, even though it has been a challenge through winter to continue when the ground is permafrost and then thaws to the point where machines sink up to their axles. We have to work ways to channel the water into contained sites and get it away from the work areas. As we get lower down the hill the permafrost issue won’t be quite as bad.
“We’ve been able to do around 90% of the work to date through ground-basing while we set the hauler up down the bottom, as it’s a new experience for us getting used to intermediate spars and the like. Using the Koller has been interesting and we are slowly getting faster and better at what we are doing with it – identifying the right trees to leave as spars and being able to make good use of what is available. The next hauler set will hopefully run a lot smoother than the early ones.
“Ground-basing will slowly decrease. We’ve left patches of ground base so that we can run the two operations as one and we are not separated on two different skid sites, like we are now. When we finally get out the back with the hauler, the ground base will be feeding along with the hauler to the one skid. That means the skidder can work more effectively between the two operations.”
An extensive operation
Although the Koller is the main focus of this visit, we take the opportunity to see how the rest of this operation is going, starting with the main skid where the John Deere skidder driven by Bradley Walsh is bringing down stems for the Hitachi 330 to cut into logs with the Waratah 625, which is normally operated by Adrian. Then Grayson Bennett sorts logs into various piles for loading onto the truck with the Hitachi 250. Most are destined to go to the port, but the pruned logs are heading to a local mill.
The logs sizes vary, as you’d expect for Douglas-firs planted ten years apart and still way off maturity. The forest has also been densely planted and under-thinned, so the average piece size of trees being harvested at the top of the forest is just 0.9 and some are very skinny, though Adrian says it gets better further down the hill, “but we’re not into the plum piece size yet”.
He goes on to say: “The form of the trees is varied and there have been a lot of rubbishy trees left – it would have been a difficult thinning job. So there’s a lot of up-sweep and wobble. A lot of bent stems. We run into patches where it’s really top stuff and then there are patches where the trees are bent and twisted.”
In spite of this, Mike Hurring says they are still able to make money for both themselves and the council, due to the recent rise in log prices.
A steep walk up to the top of the forest brings us to where Nigel Kengen is felling and bunching the trees for the skidder in his John Deere 2454, equipped with a SATCO 630 head. Beyond the upper
line of trees are the bare rock slopes that lead up to the Coronet Peak ski field. The crew also includes contract faller, Ashley Mangnall, to manually bring down trees that the machine cannot reach.
From up here, you get a fantastic view over the Shotover River basin, to the back of Bob’s Peak and then across to The Remarkables. Surely one of the most stunning harvesting locations in New Zealand right now.
But then our attention is drawn down the slopes of Coronet to the red and yellow of the Koller tower, which has been set up on a landing much further down the hill to pull logs from the mid slopes.
Prior to this job, the Koller has been working in some small woodlots managed by Ernslaw One and this is the first big job it has been used in. What’s it like to work with on a job like this?
“You definitely have to pick the right places to make it work,” says Adrian.
“I haven’t done a lot with the Koller and don’t do any of the operating myself but the guys we’ve got working with it are very good, although it is a bit of a challenge having to feed a carriage all the time.
“And working with spars is quite challenging. There is a lot of finetuning with a spar to get the jack to sit properly, as well as where you position your guy ropes and your jack ropes. Once you get to terms with how that is supposed to sit and supposed to look it does function quite well.
“They are slow to put up. Safety is an issue, because you’ve got to climb the tree, take off the top of the tree, get your guy ropes into the tree. That’s another element and it’s not a fast-paced job because it takes time to get it up safely and operating properly.
“Where we do have our spars we have to make sure we leave high stumps for our people to put the guy ropes onto. Not easy to find those stumps when you have trees lying on the ground all around them.
“In the younger parts of the forest it can also be difficult finding the right tree to use as a spar.”
There are no spars being used in the current setting as the crew is making use of a track formed above the landing to drive the winch-assist machine to act as a tailhold machine while it was parked up for a while.
The perfect machine for the job
Mike Hurring has arrived to check on the site and we drive down to watch the Koller and chat about its role in this job.
Pulling up next to the Austrian tower, it still looks as good as the last time I saw it near Gisborne, where it was set up to drag Corsican Pine averaging 1-tonne piece size from a block in the Mangatu Forest. Very similar to the size of wood being harvested here in Coronet Forest.
“It’s the perfect machine for this wood,” says Mike, adding that he was interested in European tower haulers before he purchased the Koller.
“I did a trip with Rien Visser (Head of Forest Engineering at Canterbury University’s School of Forestry) to Europe the year before with the intention of seeing how a forwarder performed in a winch-assist system. (See page 41 for Rien’s recent research.)
“I saw the Koller and I was most impressed with these machines and thought there’s a place for them in our woodlots. Everyone here has this idea that you have to be producing 300 tonnes per day to make a hauler pay, which is a crock…..
“After I went on that trip I thought I’d love one of those, this is me, I’ve got to have one. When I got back and this one of Christian’s became available, ‘I said I’ll have that’.
“We’ve done a couple of little jobs with it – we never had a specific place for it, so we’d just throw it in with a wheeled harvester and a couple of little crews and see how it went. Because they are reasonably simple, there’s a variety of jobs it can be used in. Although this job is not without its challenges, especially as we are downhill-harvesting.”
It is easier to pull wood uphill with a tower like this, especially with intermediate spars providing extra height off the ground.
Here at Coronet, the landing is wide enough to allow the Koller to be positioned right at the far edge to aid deflection. It also provides extra space for the old Cat processor to move in and pull the stems out of the way and bunch for the skidder – the Waratah head on the end is not being used to cut logs.
What makes the Koller totally different from any other yarding system used in New Zealand is that there is no cab. It is operated by remote control units held by the two men working with the Koller.
Mike explains: “The guy here on the ground with the machine sends the carriage back and it will return to where it was previously working automatically and the guy up on the top will take over the control.
“He chains up the logs, sends them up to the carriage and signals for the wood to go down the hill. Down here the operator will get to it when he’s ready and unchain the trees.
“On our last setting we had three jack trees set up. Young Drew (McBride) is an ex-arborist, so he’s the wee monkey up the tree. He tops them if needed, although it’s not really necessary under the ACOP. Because we have an arborist we’ve been able to hit the ground running with things like that.
“But it still took a bit of time. When they first started working out the jack system it was time-consuming, taking up to seven hours sometimes. We didn’t have the Jacks sorted quite well enough, but we soon worked it out. It has been a real learning curve. Now we’ve brought the tailhold in to do this last piece before we move again and go back to intermediate spars.”
Even positioning the machine to drag the wood took some figuring out on slopes this steep.
“When the tower was sitting up on that pad over there the wood was coming straight at them and it was a real bugger, because the trees would come down and fly past the carriage and they pigtailed,” adds Mike.
“We’ve changed our ways now and we won’t be doing straight up and down any more – we’ll do more of what we are doing here to get out from an angle. In the next setting we’ll push the rope around that face and we’ll come across the face to get the logs up and coming in nicer, not directly at us.”
While the Koller is compact and weighs in at just 17 tonnes, it can haul over reasonably long distances, with the skyline drum capable of holding 945 metres of ¾” swaged rope, or 720 metres of 7/8” swaged rope offered by the factory. The mainline capacity is 640 metres of ½” swaged rope or 730 metres of 12mm swaged rope. The haulback line capacity is 1,180 metres of ½” swaged rope, or 1,350 metres of 12mm swaged rope, or 1,570 metres of 7/16” swaged rope or 1,600 metres of 11mm swaged rope.
The New Zealand machine runs synthetic ropes with the mainline using half-inch dyna pack, with a three-quarter inch rope on the skyline. The strawline is 4mm Dyneema and is ridiculously light.
“That’s fishing line,” laughs Mike. “To run the strawline out is a piece of cake, there’s no weight in it.”
Mike says all the ropes are still original but with the odd breakage they are now shorter and the maximum length available now is down to around 400 metres.
Powering the drums is a 6-cylinder, 7.15-litre, Deutz common rail diesel that has proved very reliable during its time in New Zealand and, compared to a traditional tower or even a swing yarder, it is very economical, using up one-quarter of a tank per day. The lightweight carriage is similarly cheap to run, consuming little more than 2 litres per day.
When it comes to shifting the Koller, this model comes with its own propulsion system that can manoeuvre itself around the landing, but for moving to new locations it is normally towed by the bulldozer.
There’s no need to move the tower at the moment, but the setting
will need to be adjusted because breaker-out, Sylvester Reeves, is unable to reach any more trees with the chains. So he climbs up to the backline machine to re-position it further over and completes the task in a few minutes. That short timeline wouldn’t be possible with intermediate spars.
It’s a win-win
While Sylvester is shifting the tailhold, I take the opportunity to chat with Drew about their experiences with the Koller and his shift into logging after a career as an arborist.
“I worked in the bush before I was an arborist, I used to cut windfall,” says Drew, adding that it has still been a big learning curve coming back to logging and working with this technology just a year ago.”
Drew is the only Queenstown-based member of the crew, with most of the others staying in a house owned by Mike Hurring in nearby Cromwell during the week.
And is he enjoying a return to tree climbing as part of the job? “Yes, my arborist skills are being used regularly and it’s a good skill to have for this.”
While he has driven plenty of diggers, Drew has “never run a machine like this, never worked a hauler before, either”.
But he is impressed with the way the Koller works, saying: “This machine has a lot of technology, but it is simple to control. We’ve learnt a lot about it since we came in here.
“The challenge is upping production now – learning about the intermediate spar trees. It will be pretty awesome around here and offer a lot of options.”
One thing that stands out is the speed of the drags. The carriage is quick, and so is the line speed, with the mainline able to travel at up to 500m/min. Even with just one person on the hill chaining up logs, it still means that a turnaround of less than 5 minutes is achievable as they get more familiar with the machine.
For Mike Hurring, the Kohler has already repaid his faith in the European technology: “It’s magic. I knew what I was getting because I had seen them working in Austria.
“They’ve got a track-mounted model now, which would be really good in our terrain and an electric one, which would be the next stage. They are great for woodlots. They are not a big hauler and you don’t need to produce – on a good day the guys will do 120 JAS with this machine.”
And it will need to do those figures much more regularly as the ground-base harvesting reduces. But Mike is confident that will happen.
“The job is tracking pretty well if you look at what we’ve produced to date and where we’re at,” he says.
“We are sitting at around 157 JAS a day and we’ve done around 30,000 JAS since we started at the beginning of last year.”
In addition to roading, harvesting and organising the cartage on this site, the Hurring team is also contracted to over-sow each block with grass in the Spring to keep the weeds suppressed, prior to the native planting getting underway.
Mike gestures to a logged area to the side and says: “The area that we over-sowed first was 35 hectares. We recovered 30,000 JAS off that 35 hectares. Of that 30,000 JAS, there’s been just 1,000 tonnes of firewood – we’ll get a contractor in to take the firewood off, so the non-merchantable wood has been very minimal.”
If Mike’s team can continue that sort of effort for the remaining
two years it will take to complete the harvesting of Coronet Forest they’ll be very happy. So will Queenstown Lakes District Council and everyone who loves the natural environment in places like this.
What this experience will also have shown is that there can be a win-win for landowners and local authorities by utilising experienced loggers to remove troublesome trees and still seeing some financial return instead of it being a cost
And it will, no doubt, have raised interest in what a European tower hauler can do in New Zealand when used on the right harvesting jobs.