This may help explain the cost of lumber now days, wow.
I’m guessing by your comment that you think Heli-logging is expensive. Yes it is but not as expensive as trucks, crew, road building, equipment at every loadout plus moving the area after every site is logged. There is no way to build a road that a truck could navigate in terrain like that. Even if you could build a road in that terrain, which for a bush truck you need at least 20ft wide road for a truck with 16ft bunks, you might get two loads out a day but one would probably be more realistic.
they Heli-log christmas trees in Oregon the same way, Cut and pile them on carriers, helicopter comes and hooks on and flies them to a central loading facility where they are run through a wrapper and loaded into vans to be hauled away. The TV show AxMen had for 2 or 3 years a helicopter logger in the mix, several years after he was on the show Bart Colantuono died when a rotor sepreated and crashed wile logging. I me him at an air show about a year before he died.
The price of lumber is a direct result of the virus and people being told to stay home. DIY projects and new homes and sick loggers and mill workers caused shortages and the price jumping, things are starting to drop, the lumber company I haul for is starting to get a decent inventory built back up. But the wild fires in California and the west are causing issues . One fire in California burned a bridge that is a main line for UP from Oregon to California and the southwest, so now trains are having to make huge detours to get freight to customers.I saw where BNSF trains have to go Montana before they can come south, then back over Donner to get to the California Central valley, and So. California
Wow! I wouldn’t want to be the guy standing directly under the helicopter, attaching stuff to it as it hovers. If anything goes wrong, he’d be crushed.
Ray the pilot has a release button/switch , safer and if in flight any issues they can dump the load if needed.