Making Work Easy Way Up North

Cal Westcott

Cal Westcott may not be exactly on top of the world, but he’s awfully close—just 23 degrees and 27 minutes latitude south of the North Pole, otherwise known as the Arctic Circle.

An outdoor recreation planner with the Bureau of Land Management, Westcott is responsible for maintaining 22 recreation sites along the Dalton Highway. That’s an area which runs from Fairbanks, Alaska, north to Prudhoe Bay, a distance of more than 500 miles. One of these sites is a campground located right on the Arctic Circle.

Last year, Westcott and another operator, Roy Flemmer, (in photo below) used a Bobcat® T190 compact track loader with a Bobcat Brushcat® rotary cutter to thin out dwarf birch and alder trees at the campground.

“Clearing the site by hand with fire crews wasn’t an option because they were fighting wild fires in the lower 48 states,” he says. “At the same time, the cost of using a large, hydraulically-powered tree ax machine was prohibitive. Using the T190 and the rotary cutter made a lot of sense.”

Craig Taylor Equipment Co., the Bobcat dealer in Fairbanks, helped Westcott select the T190, which features an enclosed cab with heat, and the Brushcat rotary cutter.

The Brushcat attachment made easy work of removing trees. The trees were 3 to 14-ft.-tall, had 2 to 3-in.-diameter trunks and were spaced less than 1 ft. apart. “With the power of the loader and rotary cutter it was almost like mowing grass,” Westcott says. “We cut the trees up into small enough pieces that no clean-up was required afterwards.”