Save the wear and tear on your equipment and your time. Hire a mulcher. The guy that did mine had a mulcher that was 6 feet wide. He was a good operator and did two small plots and about 300 yards of trail. All done in one day and everything flat and level with nothing to trip on. Total cost was under $2500.
I had about three miles of trail like that cleared with a mulcher. Most of it was in ground with few rocks and no stumps at all remained after mulching - just chips. No brush to contend with after clearing. About a 1/4 mile was upland with some rock and there were half a dozen 3” tall stumps I had to remove with a chainsaw afterwards.
Very nice!
I’ve tried it all. Dozer. Mulcher if your pockets are deeper and there is absolutely zero water management (grading) to do. This is assuming that it’s more than a few hundred yards. If a small job, maybe brute forcing it with hand tools and a tractor is your best bet.
It can be done like that. But man it will be tough. A forestry mulcher would do that trail in about an hour.
First, you’re going to want to start way wider than your minimum width. Brush on the sides is going by to creep and lean into your trail relentlessly. You need 12’ clear width at ground level to have 2’ of clear width at eye level.
Not sure how I missed the pic. You aren’t ripping many of those up with a box blade. What is working in your favor is that they’re really tall. I’m guessing it’s a pretty closed canopy, so you won’t have to deal with the encroachment into your trail that I mentioned earlier. However this also makes felling difficult. Crowns are gonna be tangled. If it’s more than a few hundred yards, I’m still saying dozer.
I can’t envision what an experienced sawyer might clean up from a mulching job. Good chainsawers are the scalpel. Mulchers are a Murray lawnmower.
It’s a good question to ask. Around here a mulcher is 2-3x the cost of a dozer. Dozers can easily make up the cost difference by working those stump holes. Maybe not everywhere.
