Timber harvesting operations often employ continuous landings on or along truck road right-of-ways. During the harvest-unit design process forest engineers describe the spatial distribution of turns with respect to a proposed landing by distribution parameters such as average yarding distance and average yarding slope. In this two-part paper these parameters and others are derived for a continuous landing model. In this first paper, parameters are derived and applied to a continuous landing located on or along a road center-line tangent. In the second paper, a similar development is applied to a continuous landing located on or along the circular curve of a road.