"…we could measure the width of trees, the height of trees, and we could grade trees to decide what quality lumber we were marking."
Timber marking: when you timber mark you use what they call silviculture. That's one of the terms they use in forestry. I guess that's what forestry is all about, is silviculture. I don't know exactly what the definition of that is, but it's the science of—probably the science of taking care of the trees, deciding how they'll grow and how they'll be cut and all that. So they took us through quite a bit of training in silviculture, so that we could measure the width of trees, the height of trees, and we could grade trees to decide what quality lumber we were marking. So that was a really good experience as far as learning all about trees, as far as the quality of trees.
And then after we had the training, then we actually went out and started marking. And what we would do is, we would go out in a line. I think I might have started out with six or seven people, and we would spread out—oh, gosh, I can't remember how many feet apart we were—probably about fifty feet apart. And we would look at a map and figure out which direction we were heading for, and we would probably walk about ten miles a day. We would make sure we covered our area, and we could tell, we'd cover up to where the next person was, because we could see their marks. So we could tell if any trees were left untouched. And what we'd mostly do is go up to groups of trees and decide which ones needed to be thinned out of that group of trees—or which ones would actually be marked to use for them to cut down for lumber.