What’s in Rich’s Cruise Vest?
The deeper I dig into my vest pockets, the more interesting the items I seem to find. As I personally favor my cruise prisms, somewhere buried between the string cheese wrappers and fir needles, I found my angle gauge.
An angle gauge does nearly the same job as the cruise prism. The difference between the two tools is that instead of looking through a ground glass prism, the forester compares the width of a tree to the width of the gauge. The distance of the gauge from the eye as well as the width of the gauge helps determine which trees to measure using trigonometry.
One type of angle gauge our foresters have used in the past is what we like to call a “tooth chain”. With this tool, the forester puts the rubber grommet portion of a chain between their teeth, stretches the chain and gauge away from their eye, they can then determine if the tree is “in” or “out” of the plot, and if they should or should not measure it.
-Rich Congdon, Real Estate Specialist/Assistant Analyst
