We feel that best practice for natural burial is for someone to come to the forest and find a location that resonates with them. Some people even come and camp out overnight to see what sort of dreams they have, or come to think of their grave-to-be as their private place to get away for a day or three. This practice of selecting a grave site in advance is often called a pre-need arrangement.

But often, death comes before one has all the arrangements in place, and in that case, a series of tasks fall to the person who’s charged with making the at-need arrangements. To help with that, Herland Forest maintains a handful of pre-dug graves that can be selected from when time is of the essence or the weather makes digging graves by hand especially problematic.

For example, here’s a short panoramic shot of a grave in the middle forest where there are lots of Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir trees.