22 BULLETIN 1494, U. S. DEPT. OF AGRICULTURE 
COST OF PILING AND BURNING 
The cost of piling and burning slash in the white pine type under 
Forest Service standards will usually range between $0.60 and $1.25 
per thousand feet, based on 1923 and 1924 wage scales. The cost is 
affected greatly by the amount of undergrowth, especially hemlock 
and white fir thickets, which are cut in making skid roads and must 
be handled along with the slash from the timber. The percentage of 
defect in the timber is also an important factor. If timber is 30 
per cent defective, it is obvious that 30 per cent more slash than the 
log scale would indicate must be handled. A fair average cost for 
piling and burning in the white pine type would be $0.90 per 
thousand. 
The information on slash-disposal costs is based chiefly on the cost 
after the logging has been completed as done on Forest Service cut- 
tings. If the job of slash disposal is taken over by the logger and a 
serious effort is made to coordinate it with the other logging opera- 
tions, a very considerable saving in cost seems possible. For exam- 
ple, the very heavy slash produced in cutting rights of way for roads 
and chutes, instead of being thrown to one side and later rehandled, 
can often be burned at the time in the middle of the right of way, 
with an appreciable saving in cost. There are also possibilities in 
having the swampers do a good deal of the piling, and in some cases 
the slash can be burned by the swampers before skidding. 
The cost of slash disposal should be considered as a logging cost 
for removing fire danger threatening adjoining lands, standing tim- 
ber, young growth, logging improvements, and other values. It 
should not properly be figured as an investment in reforestation of 
the particular piece of land on which the work is done. For ex- 
ample, the Priest River unit of the Kaniksu National Forest will 
produce a sustained annual yield of 26,000,000 feet a year. The 
slash disposal on this cut will amount to about $26,000 a year. This 
should be considered not as an investment of $20 to $30 an acre on 
the area cut over each year but rather as an annual charge of 11 cents 
an acre for protection against the 240,000 acres of preductive tim- 
berland within the unit. 
An added logging cost of $0.60 to $1.25 per thousand for slash 
disposal is an item of sufficient importance to need some justification. 
Part of this expense may be considered as an investment in the 
timber crops of the future. ,There is reason to believe, however, that 
a large part if not all of the cost of proper slash disposal in the white 
pine type can be recovered in reduced fire-fighting costs and smaller 
losses in standing timber, logs, camps, and other improvements. 
Several instances could be cited where forest fires resulting largely 
from hazardous slash conditions have cost individual lumber com- 
panies enough to have paid several times the cost of piling and burn- | 
ing all the slash from their operation. Fires are not infrequent in 
white pine logging operations, and they destroy camps, flumes, rail- 
road trestles, and logs, valued at many thousand dollars, besides 
entailing the cost of fire fighting and the loss from disorganization 
of the operations. Such fires are usually the direct result of undis- 
posed-of slash. On the other hand, there is no record of any serious 
