We decided that we’d like to get rid of the pines, so we hired a logger to cut them and haul them away.  He started work in December 2001.

At the beginning it wasn’t too bad – the weather was cold enough that the ground didn’t get too disturbed.

But as the days went by, it got warmer, and the ground thawed, and the machines dug up the soil and left deep ruts.  Instead of stopping work and waiting for colder weather, as he’d promised, they kept working.

Hauling the logs down to the driveway.

By the time they were finished, it was a mess.  They left tall stumps, so we couldn’t get in to mow, and piles of slash, and torn up ground.

They left a road along the top, along the edge of the uncut woods.

The logger had broken so many promises during the course of the work that we were just anxious for him to get out as soon as possible. We were pretty discouraged about the way it looked, but we didn’t know what to do about it.

The one hopeful thing was that the view from Big View Prairie was much better – no thick dark pine trees in the way.

We did leave a few pines.  Just above the planted ones were some volunteers – trees that had grown from seeds from the planted pines.  They weren’t in rows, so they looked better.  So, although they aren’t naturally found here, we left them growing.

I threw prairie seeds down on the muddy logging road.

We replanted the field with prairie seeds, but left the slash and mud and tried to forget about it.