A change of pace — not federal forest planning, but interesting: An article in Switchboard Magazine by Nathan Rizzuti offers an inside look at Louisiana’s oddest odd job: hunting for long-submerged cypress trees. “Cypress – taxodium distichum – goes by many names: bald cypress, red cypress, swamp cypress, gulf cypress. But if you hack away at a living cypress tree on state property, the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry can, and will, serve you up to a 5-year prison sentence and a fine of up to $5,000. … Hamilton and Jack go for the wood that’s been dead a long time – sinker cypress, also commonly called deadhead logs. Sinker cypress is a term for mature cypress logs that were cut or felled anywhere between one hundred to five hundred years ago. A handful of factors determine a log’s value, but a large, mature stick can fetch a price upwards of $20,000,” he wrote.
Similar was done at Nam Ngum reservoir in Laos. They’d originally cut the trees prior to the dam in the late 60s but left the large stumps. In the late 90s they were harvesting the stumps with cranes on barges. Rosewood, ebony etc.
In the early 2000s I noticed a proposed dam a long long way from any needed electric sources and the company that wanted to build the dam was a lumber company. The river hardly seemed to have much of a flow to be worth building miles of electric lines. I figured they wanted to cut the timber which still existed and then go bankrupt. I’ve heard a copper company has since mined the area and they used the hydro for power. I walked through that valley back in 08 (no roads) Some trees had 10′ diameter at head hight.