It's been a busy few weeks for tree planters working to re-forest a large swath of logged area southwest of High River.

Loggers have spent the last couple of years taking trees from a stretch of K-Country west of Chain Lakes to the Crowsnest Pass.

Now they're reclaiming it, by planting hundreds of thousands of trees.

Errol Kutcher with Spray Lake Sawmills says they have to prep the land first.

"What we typically do is the year after harvest, we do a site treatment, where we'll have a piece of equipment go in there and till the soil a bit, and then the following year we go back and replant."

Kutcher says one interesting thing is before they can even start to log, they have to bring in archaeologists.

He says they didn't find anything this year, but they have in the past, which means they have to move any planned roads.

"Really what they're worried about is the ground disturbance, if it's just a matter of logging over an area we're not typically disturbing much of the soil. Depending on the significance of their find, they may allow us to take the trees as long as we're not constructing a road through. But if it is a significant find, then it's just protected entirely."

Kutcher says they plant trees grown from seeds harvested from the exact area they log in, so the trees going back are just offspring of what was already there.

 

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