Background

Galbraith Mountain is a privately-owned commercial working forest surrounded on 3 sides by neighborhoods along Samish Way, Lakeway/Lake Louise Road and Yew Street. Since 1986, WMBC has been building and maintaining trails on Galbraith Mountain and have been the authorized trail stewards since 2001. That original Recreation Use Agreement transferred from the former owners (Trillium Corporation) to Polygon Financial in 2011. Between 2011 and 2018, we assisted the City and Whatcom Land Trust in negotiating permanent easements across the 2,240 acres purchased by Galbraith Tree Farm in 2017.

The four main landowners on Galbraith are Galbraith Tree Farm (2,240 acres), Polygon LLC (650 acres), City of Bellingham (400 acres) and the Department of Natural Resources (50 acres) along with some smaller private in-holdings.

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TIMBER MANAGEMENT
Janicki Logging (along with their subcontractors) performs timber management operations throughout the year including aerial spraying, commercial and non- commercial thinning, road construction and clear cutting. Because Galbraith is a dynamic landscape, WMBC manages the evolving trail network unlike other areas in Whatcom County. Within the timber management, there are two types of logging on Galbraith that impact the public’s trail access each year: thinning and clear cutting.

THINNING
Thinning is where the loggers harvest a percentage of trees in a particular area. After thinning, there is a variable amount of damage to the trails. In most sections, there is slash (cut branches, tops of trees, etc.) laying across the trail. Restoring these sections of trail can typically be cleaned up by hand with typically little tread repair that needs to take place. Piles of slash surround 100% of the trail tread post-harvest and keep sediment from traveling no more than a few feet.

There are also bigger trail crossings during thinning where the machines have created a "road" that the loggers use to travel across the trail to haul logs to their landings. For this part of their operation, they use a machine called a forwarder which has 5' tall wheels with chains on them. The crossings typically have 3-5' deep ruts from the machine where the slash is driven into the soil. The crossings tend to be narrow (30-50 feet wide) but are a massive amount of work to restore.

Depending on the topography and vehicle/road access points, the loggers will sometimes utilize the trail corridor itself and create 3-5’ deep ruts going down the trail itself and require significantly more work to restore. An example of this was the middle section of Atomic Dog during last year’s harvest. Because of the intensity of trail damage, we restore the crossings and ruts with our mini-excavator and then do hand work to button things up at the end. Sometimes, there is just a few crossings and sometimes there's large sections of trail destroyed.

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CLEAR CUTS
As the name would suggest, this operation is when the loggers take all the trees within an area (minus the ones they keep for the Habitat Conservation Plan - HCP). By and large, this harvest operation impacts an entire trail or area of trails and most of the trail tread is heavily impacted by their machines with slash driven into the ground. When restoring trails in clear cuts, we use our mini excavator to move slash away from the trail corridor and then have hand crews (volunteers typically) do the final shaping and compaction of dirt. As with thinning operations, there are piles of slash surrounding 100% of the trail tread post-harvest that keeps sediment from traveling no more than a few feet. Areas on Galbraith that have had extensive clear cuts like the Bears, Bunny Trails, SST and Lost Giants are indicative of the level of work in these zones.

RESTORING ACCESS
An important aspect of Galbraith being a working forest is the volume of trails affected during harvest operations. In the past 5 years, nearly every trail has been impacted in some way and last year (2019-2020) more than 1/4 of the mountain's acreage had timber harvest and the WMBC restored 22 miles of trail. During the 2019-20 season, trail access on the north side (Birch Street) was completely closed when The Ridge, Bob’s, Cedar Dust and FF Center were being thinned. The North Side access is the primary route from Bellingham and the closure affected more than 50% of the public’s access to the mountain. When these closures occur, we redirect ALL traffic to the south side of the mountain (Galbraith Lane) and to other neighborhood access trails which invariably causes friction with neighbors. As such, it is always WMBC’s goal to get trail access restored as quickly and as efficiently as possible post-harvest.