Forests & People - Fire Camp Sports

*Intermission*

Top Ten Athletic Events I’ve Seen, #3

Fire Camp Sports Event

Meadow Lake Fire

September, 1975

The Meadow Lake Fire raged for the first two weeks in September 1975 in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains.   It was a tough fire, the weather and terrain were against us.   Every day fire would rush through the tree tops and overtake our fire lines, sending crews scurrying for safety zones (sometimes skimpy) as fire spread another several hundred acres.  There were about 200 of us fighting this thing, finally after two weeks of being chased all over the mountain, we got fire lines around the main fire and the spot fires and were able to hold it.   At that point we started to allow the Hot Shot Crews to prepare to leave the fire.  

A Hot Shot Crew is made up of 20 firefighters, every one of them has several years of fire fighting experience, they are young, they are strong and athletic.  These crews are assigned to the hottest and most difficult parts of a fire and are expected to put out maximum effort for up to 18 hours of initial attack.   After initial attack their shifts normally settles down to 12 hours of the toughest work in fire fighting.   They are impressive people.  There were six Hot Shot Crews on this fire.   

We held all six crews in during the day before they would leave so they could clean up, get their gear in order, and rest.   The next morning we would have airplanes waiting for them in Sheridan, Wyoming to take them to their home base, or another fire. 

Once Hot Shot Crew members have a little time to rest they start looking for something to do.   That restlessness started to come up after supper.   One crew challenged another to a contest - good -  they started to figure out what kind of contest -- there wasn’t a football or any other kind of ball within fifty miles. 

They roped off an area about half the size of a football field, by then it was getting dark so they lined up a bunch of pickups outside the roped  area and turned on the headlights to light the “field”.   The “rules” they came up with were:  Each crew, 20 people, would have five water-pump backpacks (That’s a rubber bladder that holds about eight gallons of water, it has shoulder straps so it is carried like a backpack. There is a small hose between the bladder to a hand pump that squirts a stream of water.  It is a tool used for putting out small hot spots after a fire is controlled, there are hundreds of these used on fires, we call them piss pumps.)  OK-- a field with a roped off boundary, lit by pickup headlights; two, twenty-man teams; each team with five piss pumps,  THEN  each crew leader put a lit cigar in his mouth.   The objective was to put the other crew’s cigar out!!   NO RULES, no time, no referee.   After a “game”  two other crews would take to the field, then the winners would challenge each other.   

That “game” made rugby look like a fifth-grade playground activity!! Guys were being tackled and rolled, lifted on shoulders of others all of it on a dead run with both offense (the piss pumps) and defense going on at the same time often in one big wet scrum of 40 guys with arms and boots flying in all directions.   No one was hurt, and finally they all wore themselves out. 

There is no beer allowed in a fire camp and generally no one carries any money on a fire -- so no betting.   This athletic event was strictly “for the fun of it."   

After this playful interlude, they dried out the wet cigars, grabbed some “ZZZZs” and the next day they flew out, ready for the serious business of initial attack on a raging fire in rugged mountain terrain.     

I’ve seen professional football games, they don’t make my top ten list of athletic events, the Hot Shot Crews do. 

Jerry

Forests & People - About Fire

Fires and People

The ninteen-eighty-eight fire season was a game changer in the Western forests, especially the forests in the Northern Rockies. 

It was dry, very dry.  One of the measurements forest fire scientists use is the moisture content of dead wood on the forest floor.  There are the twigs and small branches called flash fuels and there are the medium size down trees that would normally take 100 hours to burn (+ or -), finally there are the large tree trunks on the ground that would normally take 1000 hours to burn (+ or -).  The thinking is, the bigger the piece of wood the more moisture content there is in its middle causing it to burn more slowly.  In the summer 1988 the thousand-hour-fuels were about as dry as kiln dried lumber in the lumber yard — that’s dry.  That means it wouldn’t take much heat to get them burning and they would burn with high intensity and, of course, the flash fuels would burn hotter and faster than “normal” because they held almost no moisture.  

At that time, fire behavior science held that fire didn’t spread in even aged lodgepole pine stands.  There isn’t enough fuel on the ground to carry the heat.  During the summer of ’88 the green tree tops were so dry that heat from fuels on the forest floor was not needed to carry a fire through the tree crowns, flames exploded from tree top to tree top causing whole forested ridges to ignite with frightening speed.

That summer The Canyon Fire in the Bob Marshall Wilderness had been allowed to burn from the time it started in July, it was burning within the prescription for fire in the Wilderness.  But the forest was drying through the summer and on September 6,  jet stream winds touched the ground causing the fire to blow up, burning outside the prescription.  Fire fighters tried to hold it, but it couldn’t be stopped.  September 6 and 7 the Canyon fire burned 180 acres every sixty-seconds for 18 hours, much of the burned forest was mature lodgepole pine.  When it stopped, the fire had burned 240,600 acres.  That was dramatic, but the news media didn’t pay much attention to the Canyon Creek fire, and there was a good reason.

The nation’s attention that summer was focused on the fires in Yellowstone National Park, Yellowstone Lodge was threatened, Cook City, north of the Park, was threatened.  Politicians were helicoptering around the fire, some spouting threats and ultimatums.  That didn’t help anything.  There were 9000 firefighters fighting the Yellowstone fires, in the end 800,000 acres were burned - that’s a lot.

Smoke jumper comin' in.

On the northern border of Montana, near Canada, the Red Bench fire broke out on September 6 and roared from the Flathead National Forest across the North Fork of the Flathead River into Glacier National Park.  It was finally controlled on December 1, the last fire controlled that year.  There were 71 large fires in the Northern Rockies that terrible summer, September 10 was the worst day, twenty major fires were burning, with 16,000 people engaged in fighting them. 

John Mumma, the Regional Forester for the Northern Region of the Forest Service summed it up, “In 1988, the Region experienced more days of extreme burning conditions than any other year in recorded history.  New maximum levels of energy release, burning indices, and rates of spread were established.  Fire behavior observed that summer baffled the experts with its unprecedented and never-before-observed intensity.  We obtained new knowledge and new experience in the summer of ‘88.  If need be, we can do it again and do it better because of what we’ve learned.”  (John W. Mumma. “Northern Region, Summer of ‘88” letter and booklet to firefighters, March 1989)

Fire Management -  Fire Science

  

The actions taken on wild fires in National Parks, National Forests, BLM lands and Wilderness are governed by fire management plans.  Most of these plans were developed in the 1980’s and were in effect in 1988.  An important objective in these plans is to allow fire to play a more natural role in the western forests.  The natural role of fire, before white settlement, was for fires to pass through a forest from time to time, in many areas the fire cycle was about every ten years. The dryness and fire behavior in 1988 showed it doesn’t always work well to impose a natural fire occurrence onto a forest that has been made unnatural by eighty years of eliminating fire from the forest.  When the dry years come there is a lot of fuel accumulation ready to burn - hot!

As bad as the 1988 fires were, 1910 was worse.  There had been no significant rain since March in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, Idaho and Washington.   The first fire that year was on April 29, by August there were hundreds of small and medium size fires burning. Then, on August 20 and 21, hurricane force winds rolled over the small fires whipping them together into a blazing inferno that swept over three million acres of mountain forests, destroying several small towns and one-third of Wallace, Idaho.  At least 85 people were killed.  Smoke from the fires reached New England.  By the time the fires were over, Forest Service rangers had employed over 10,000 people to fight the fires, including Company I of the 125 Army Infantry.

The 1910 fires initiated a national debate about fire management.  The majority, and the powerful, were on the side insisting all fires be put out as quickly as possible.  A minority, mostly scientists, argued “fire has an important role in the forest and where possible should be allowed to burn.”  The scientists lost.  The new policy was simple, understandable and powerful, “put out every fire start by 10:00 am the next day.”  If a Forest Service ranger missed that target, it wouldn’t be long before there was a different ranger on the district.  Of course every fire wasn’t put out by 10:00 am the next day, but fire as a part of the forest ecosystem was greatly reduced.  The “10;00 am Policy” was supported by: increased fire science research, fire organizations on Forest Service ranger districts, fire lookouts, mule pack strings to haul fire fighting supplies to remote fires, smokejumpers, forest roads, truck mounted pumpers, aerial fire attack, helicopter fire attack, fire shelters, even improved shovels for fire fighting.  An intense fire prevention campaign was launched to remove fire from the forest and make fire a villain.  Smokey the Bear was, and is, the star, even the Disney movie “Bambi” played into it nicely .  This policy against wild fire has continued for more than 90 years, it change forest ecology throughout North America and became a model for the rest of the world.  It took until 1988 to see the policy’s results, and they weren’t all good. 

In the 1930’s some forest scientists began to sound the alarm that the effective fire control was allowing too much dead wood to build up on the forest floor.  It took until the 1970’s for this reality to become widely accepted.  Of course, the problem was, when there is a fire start, these heavy fuels will build so much heat the crowns of the trees will dry, catch fire and spread rapidly, burning completely our of control and often unstoppable by human effort. 

The agencies began developing fire management plans that would allow fires to burn in certain areas - far from people’s structures and human activity - under carefully prescribed conditions.  If a fire burned out of the prescribed boundaries or if weather conditions were developing that could put fire outside the prescription, the fire would be put out, or fought to reduce its spread.   In addition to fire prescriptions stating the conditions a fire may be allowed to burn there are fire prescriptions to accomplish certain desirable things in the forest.  Fire scientists light prescribed fires with the objectives to burn fuels on the ground, to prepare the land for seeding or planting trees, to stimulate wildlife browse and improve the beauty of the forest - yes, prescribed fire can do all that.   The news media’s term for these fire prescriptions is “let burn policy.”   That term is such an over simplification it has zero accuracy and is terribly misleading, yet it is perpetuated because it is so simple.

A new word came into the fire vocabulary after 1988, Mega-fires.  Mega-fires defy the assumption that increased wildfire threats can be matched with greater fire suppression force and planning.  American Mega fires in 2000, 2004, 2013 and in fires in Australia burned right through the old myth that enough effort can stop a fire.  Mega-fires burn until a change in weather stops their rampage.  Fire fighters can try to protect high value areas and properties that are in the fire’s anticipated path, but those efforts are certainly not always (or often) successful.

The formal reviews after the fires of ‘88 decided that the fire plans were basically sound scientifically and economically and are socially responsible.  But, there were needs for much better coordination and information flow between federal land management agencies, states, local fire officials, the news media, the local public and politicians.  There needed to be better science about forest fires and weather.  That has been the effort since the fire season of 1988.

Forests & People - "Change your ways."

Senator Church and Senator McGee

In the late 1960’s, Senator Gail McGee, from Wyoming, was hearing complaints concerning 1000 acre clearcuts, and too many roads in the northern Wyoming National Forests.  A Wyoming Forest Study Team was set up to investigate, if they found real problems they would recommend practices to correct the problems.  They found real problems!  Their report came out in 1971, “Forest Management in Wyoming.”  The report recommends that timber harvests should pay more attention to wildlife, recreation, scenery and water quality and quantity.  Clearcuts are considered an important silvicultural tool, but should be limited in size, 35 or 40 acres, not hundreds of acres.  The roads need a whole lot more thought and engineering because they are the greatest source of erosion and cause the greatest impact on water quality. (Wyoming Forest Study Team, Forest Management in Wyoming, 1971)  Forest Service officials reviewed the report and in a letter (2470) dated August 27, 1971 accepted most of the recommendations and directed foresters to follow the direction of the report.  

At about there same time, Senator Frank Church of Idaho was investigating complaints of forest abuse on the National Forests.  His investigation also found wrong forest practices by the Forest Service. Senator Church came out with guidelines that recommended limiting clearcuts to 40 acres, and no clearcuts in scenic land or fragile soils. 

The Bollie Report out of the University of Montana criticized large clearcuts on the Bitterroot National Forest in Montana.  Clearcutting was the issue in a 1972 lawsuit brought by the Izaak Walton League against the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia.  The suit wanted clearcutting stopped.

Obviously the Forest Service’s forest management practices need correction.  The people were speaking, “do what is right by our National Forests, not just the cheapest way to get wood out.”   

Against this rising public concern about clearcutting and the desire to give increased attention to scenery, wildlife, and water quality; the timber industry got a bill introduced into Congress called the National Timber Supply Act, it would increase the amount of timber harvested from the National Forests by 50%.  The bill was defeated.  But, in 1970, President Nixon set up a task force to develop the “Forest and Related Resources” (FARR) plan.  Coincidentally(? !) FARR called for a 50% increase of timber harvest from the National Forests.  President Nixon told the Forest Service to do it.  That level of timber harvest could not be sustained by the land base suitable for growing trees, so it would be against the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960.  Now, there’s a problem!  That was a time before computers when the way a ranger managed his (all rangers were “he” then) district was more autonomous.  There were about 825 rangers in the National Forest System at that time, most of them heard that order and each individually said, “nope.”  It takes years of work to prepare a large timber sale, designing the necessary roads, determining the silviculture prescriptions, designing the logging systems, considering impacts on all the resources affected by tree cutting, cruising the timber (determining the amount of wood to be cut), and appraising a base price per-thousand-board-feet that provides for replanting trees and mitigating impacts on water, wildlife, recreation — and has a profit margin for bidders.  There was no money to do all the work and to respond quickly would have been irresponsible.  As far as I know there was no significant increase in tree harvesting because of this ridiculous maneuver by the administration.  In todays computer controlled world, accountability is much tighter and the ability of the on-the-ground manager to make decisions is considerably reduced.

That’s an example of politicians playing ping pong with the Forest Service as the ball, but more important, it’s our National Forest land they’re playing with and that just is not right! 

Ponderosa on Pole Mountain, Wyoming

Intermission - Moving your Canoe

Getting your 18 foot canoe from home to the river without having to lift it higher than your waist.

That's a 2 inch square metal tube that fits into the pickup trailer hitch.
It takes less that five minutes  to attach.
The canoe rests on a soft-inflated tube for a cushioned ride

A sheet of 1/2 inch plywood lays on the
pickup bed and the 2" square metal tube for a floor.

It's a "long" haul, but it is secure, no "high lifting"
and so far I haven't been stopped by the highway
patrol for being "over length."

Forests & People - Complicated!

It Is Complicated

When a new law relating to forests is passed it usually doesn’t include details necessary to implement it on the ground.  That job falls to the affected government agency to write the “regulations” outlining the details that make the law happen.  “The devil is in the details” and the regulations are the details, they will benefit some interests and hurt others.  Some of those who believe the regulations hurt them will likely take the government agency to court to see if a judge will decide if the regulation meets what the law says or not.  Sometimes a judge will say the agency is right, sometimes the judge says the agency is wrong.  Do that hundreds of times by hundreds of different judges, precedents get set and the whole thing of policy and laws  gets very complicated, contradictory and confused.  That’s why forest policy often doesn’t make common sense, but, that’s the system.  

There is another complication, just because Congress passes a bill about what to do in the forest and it is signed into law doesn’t mean it can’t be changed.  Congress made it - Congress can unmake it, or change it.  Most forest laws have some congress person pushing for amendments to change it almost continually.  This happens because some lobby group doesn’t like what’s happening and those lobbyists make campaign contributions intending that the money is going to help things go their way.  Sometimes, the Executive branch thinks a forest law should be changed and we’re off on a different track.  Often changes are needed to make a law or regulation work better.  So it goes, it’s our system.

Bald eagle on a Marias River cottonwood,
protected by the Endangered Species Act.

The Fish and the Owl

The Tennessee Valley Authority is an agency that involves the federal government in building dams on the Tennessee River system.  One of their projects was to build a dam on the Little Tennessee River called the Tellico Dam.  Construction began in the late 1960’s, a time when a lot of people were beginning to think we had built enough dams, they were everywhere for every kind of purpose.  But, once government programs such as dam building get going they are hard to stop, Congressmen, and Congresswomen, like them for their constituents good will and votes.  The Tellico Dam was mostly done when the Endangered Species Act passed in 1973 and guess what!  Some scientists found a small fish in the river below the dam that was on the Endangered Species List - the snail darter, in spite of the name it’s a fish, about three inches long.  If the dam would have an effect on the river downstream - duh - the snail darters might not make it through the change -they’d all die.  Dam(n) construction stopped.  Millions of dollars had already been spent on construction.  Some said, “We can’t have wasted all that money, finish the dam.”  Others said, “No, the law says endangered species must be protected, no matter what.”  Law suits went back and forth all the way to the Supreme Court.  The high court said, “The law says what it means, stop construction on the dam.”   This debate had a profound effect, the era of ramped dam building was over, there would be a few more dams built, but darn few.

The Endangered Species Act was powerful, but so is Congress.   As we’ve seen, what Congress does, it can undo, and it did, - undo.  Congress passed a law that said, finish the Tillico Dam, put it in operation and never mind the snail darter.  They did.  Later, more snail darters were found in lots of places.

The spotted owl is a small bird that lives in the old growth coastal rain forests of the Northwest.  The Douglas fir, spruce, hemlock, cedar forests are the backbone of western Oregon’s, Washington’s  and northern California’s logging and lumber economies, and that also is where the spotted owl makes its living.  There had been a growing opposition to logging the old growth forests of the Northwest for several years.  Many people felt deeply these forests were just too magnificent to be logged -- and logging is ugly, but the logging kept on.  Then, spotted owl advocacy groups petitioned to have the owl put on the Endangered Species List to protect it.  The way to protect it is to prevent disturbance to the places it lives, the old growth rain forest.  In 1996 the spotted owl advocates succeeded, the spotted owl went on the law’s Endangered Species List. 

The effects were devastating to the forest industries from northern California to Canada.  Timber harvesting in these coastal forests and inland was greatly reduced affecting, logging, sawmills, trucking and a whole lot of businesses that serve the people and machines in forest industries.  The basis for the economy of this huge area of American logging and saw-milling, was greatly reduced. 

These are two cases that show how powerful the Endangered Species Act is.  Some see it as a huge commitment by people to save the animals we share the planet with, others see it as a huge economic blow and waste of money for a few animals that makes no difference to people anyhow.  (?)  I suppose you could say, the in-favor-of-animals opinion is for the very long-term wellbeing of Earth and the pro-economy opinion is for the short-term view of people’s welfare.   The point is, the Endangered Species Act is there, and congress people are always trying to change it, but they haven’t been able to damage it much yet.

Forests and People - Warnings and Actions

Thinkers Warn Us

Aldo Loepold wrote A Sand County Almanac, a book of essays about forests, wildlife, nature and their relationship and importance to people.  Even if you never spend a night in a forest it is an important book to read - maybe it is especially important if you never spend a night in a forest.  The book was published in 1947, after Leopold’s death.  It struck a note with a lot of people, it challenges us to care for the natural world.   

Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, came out in 1962, it was a best seller that had many talking about our natural world and the abuses we were piling on nature.  Maybe, for the first time in history, people began to internalize nature’s role, the “silent spring” was beginning to happen, (some) people listened. 

 The Land Acts

The Cuyahoga River in Ohio flows north and empties into Lake Erie where Cleveland is.  Cities along its way had been emptying their sewage into the river for more than a hundred years by 1969.  The river had caught fire several times, but when the river burned in 1969 Time magazine noticed and ran an article with pictures showing the river burning, intensely.  The writing describes in stark terms how polluted the river had become, it caught the attention of America.   

The James River, one of the most important rivers in Virginia, had been famous for its bass fishing and white water floating, then came pollution.  A stretch of the river east of Richmond was described as “dead,” no fish lived and the only birds in sight were turkey vultures that could live on the floating offal. (The James Estuary Case Study, Chapter 9) 

Our national symbol, the bald eagle was on the way to extinction along with a whole raft of other wild species.

Congress Acts

Thresholds are out there, when one is crossed things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not, but when a threshold is crossed, change happens.  The problem is, we don’t know what the thresholds look like or when they will be crossed.  As environmental concerns piled up, people were becoming concerned, with hindsight it looks like the first “Earth Day,” April 22, 1970, was  a threshold being crossed.   Congress was acting on the side of nature: The Wilderness Act had passed in 1964, The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act in 1968, The National Environmental Policy Act was signed January 1, 1970, DDT was banned in 1972, The Clean Water Amendments passed in 1972, The Endangered Species Act in 1973, The National Forest Management Act in 1976, The Clean Air Amendments in 1977. These laws were aimed at restoring some of what we had taken from nature.  There are scores of other laws passed relating to the natural environment, but these are the most far reaching.

All of these are important, but a couple had big impacts on forests.  The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) both require public involvement in forest management decisions and that is different from the past, and important.  

The National Environmental Policy Act does some big things, it set up the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), a government agency that has far reaching powers in reviewing projects and their effect on the environment. The law sets up the machinery for the government to clean-up places that are dangerously polluted, usually by past industrial practices, they are “superfund sites.”  The other thing NEPA does is require an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) be prepared for any sizable project that impacts land, water or air and has federal money in it.  An EIS examines all the environmental impacts a project will create and presents alternatives to the proposed action, including a “no action” alternative.  A Draft EIS must be presented to the public for review and comment and their comments must be addressed as part of the Final Environmental Impact Statement.  It is a complex process to determine the possible effects of a project and how to mitigate the adverse effects.  Project EISs have been the subject of numerous lawsuits aimed at stopping or delaying proposed projects.  Typical projects that require Environmental Impact Statements on federal lands include:  highways, timber harvests, roads, pipelines, recreation developments, ski areas, fences, water systems, grazing systems — you get the idea, about anything that will impact anything.  An EIS is also required for strategic plans or programs such as a National Forest’s forest plan.  Environmental Impact Statements, make us think, they make us look at all sides of a proposed project or plan, they make the decisions transparent, and they are expensive, but cheaper than the pollution we thoughtlessly created before NEPA.

The National Forest Management Act (NFMA) requires each National Forest develop a “forest plan” describing how the forest will be managed.  Maps and detailed descriptions show the public what management activities will take place and where they can happen over the coming years. Typical management activities include, constructing and maintaining recreation facilities, road construction and maintenance, timber sale preparation, range improvements, stream rehabilitation, wildlife habitat and fisheries improvements and more.  A forest plan requires a budget to accomplish its projects, but Congress may or may not fund the Forest Service to do the work in the forest plans.  All kinds of environmentally beneficial projects may be in a plan, but if the annual budget Congress passes doesn’t have money to carry out the plan, the projects can’t be done.  Congress has not shown much commitment to funding based on forest plans.  It makes for complications out there in the forest.

Intermission, -- Cool Thoughts for a Summer Day

*Intermission*

My Top Ten Wildlife Experiences, #8

The Ptarmigan

February 1970

Montezuma Basin, Dillon Ranger District

Arapaho National Forest

“In the range of inorganic nature I doubt if any object can be found more perfectly beautiful than a fresh, deep snowdrift seen under warm light.  Its curves are of inconceivable perfection and changefulness, its surface and transparency alike exquisite, its light and shade of inexhaustible variety and inimitable finish, the shadows sharp, pale and of heavenly color, the reflected light intense and multitudinous, and mingled with the sweet occurrences of transmitted light”. (Ruskin, in Van Dyke’s The Mountain)

Eddie skiing the "Little  Professor" avalanche 

That is what lay out ahead of me on that February morning ~ Montezuma Basin, three or four square miles of folding sloping mountain basin above 12,500 feet, above timberline, leading up to 14,000 foot Gray’s and Torry’s  Peaks.  Not a track, not a blemish, not a sign of a breathing being in the entire basin.  And I could see it all as I got out of the Forest Service rig and put on my skis.   The sky was set to provide one of those no-cloud Colorado days, so when the sun cleared the Continental Divide, a couple miles east, the day would warm.  I’d been waiting for this kind of day to make this trip.  This basin was just beginning to get some recreation use in the winter, a few crosscountry skiers, an occasional train of two or three snowmobiles.  I was there to look at the avalanche hazard and see if the Forest Service (I) should put up some warning signs and, if so, where.  I had been doing that on Shrine Pass west of Vail Pass and on Loveland Pass.

But, I was really there to absorb the undisturbed winter beauty of Montezuma Basin and the grand peaks that defined its boundaries ~ the Pacific side.

It was a good snow year, the 1960’s had been a good snow decade, the snow droughts would come later in the ‘70s.

Vegetation in these alpine basins is in miniature.  There are little clumps of spruce trees, no individual gets more than four feet high because of the high winds and severe growing conditions (soil and temperature), they’re called krumholdts.  There are willows on ridges that are one inch high.  Willows along the streams get a few feet tall.  What the grasses, sedges, forbs and browse plants lack in stature they more than make up  in pure beauty.

But, on this February day all that was covered.  Only the waves of wind and mountain-shaped snow were ahead of me.  The route I choose was up a broad little draw that curved gracefully through the basin, always gaining elevation, ending at the base of the steep saddle between peaks on the Continental Divide.

By midmorning I’d tracked a few miles and had time to absorb the aloneness of my situation and the untouched beauty of this place.  My skis were sinking six or eight inches into the new light snow so there was no “gliding”, I was just going along slowly striding, breaking trail.  Hypnotized by nothing.

Then ~ from right between the tips of my skis a ptarmigan exploded out of the flawless snow chucking a fluttering straight up about six feet to its cruising elevation  and made a bee line up the drainage.

I had never been as surprised by anything in my life.  Almost all events have some hint, some clue, some lead-in indicating a change is coming.  This ptarmigan didn’t give me anything!  Neither did the snow.

After I’d settled down from my fright, it began to sink in that change, sometimes, can happen with no advanced warning, so, somehow, always consider sudden change as a possibility and prepare.

What a surprise, what a delight, WHAT A DAY!

Jerry Covault

Forests & People -

Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960

The public often accepts that private companies logging their own lands can set their own policies and practices.  That seems to be in our economic DNA, never mind that it may abuse the forest.  Public forests are a different story, people have a stake in public forests and they want a say in how they are taken care of.   After World War II, increased demand for wood put pressure on the National Forests to increase timber harvesting dramatically.  At the same time there was a rising demand for outdoor recreation and wilderness.  Automobiles were getting more reliable, roads to get to the forests and mountains were improving and military surplus four-wheel-drive jeeps that could go off-road became available.  People wanted forest areas dedicated to camping, fishing, hunting, hiking, motorbiking, skiing, snowmobiling and other outdoor recreation.  It was becoming evident that there was not enough forest land for every interest group to have it all their way.  Conflict over management of National Forests was coming from every direction.  

When conflicts go national and involve a public asset, like the National Forests, it becomes Congress’ job to deal with it, usually by passing a law.  “What do we want from our National Forests?” had become a national issue.   The Forest Service began to urge Congress to give the agency a clear mandate for managing the National Forest. To get a mandate, the Forest Service drafted a proposed bill and lobbied Congress to pass it.  The growing public concern pushed Congress to passed the draft bill and call it the “Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960.”  It says, the National Forests “shall be administered for outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed and wildlife and fish purposes.”  The Act emphasizes sustained yield of these products (Paul W. Gates, History of Public Land Law Development, pg 631).  This was what the Forest Service wanted, a statement of what the National Forests should produce written in law. This is a big deal.  It is significant that outdoor recreation was listed first among the products from the forests, but all the products are important and should receive appropriate management considering the forest conditions and opportunities.  All these “crops” were required to be managed to sustain their production into the future.

This law is important to the Forest Service because it kept the authority to manage the National Forests with the Forest Service.

I Want M!ne !

In the history of the world there has probably never been more discussion, controversy and acrimony over forests than in the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s in America.  The arguments were emotional and intense, the economies of the lumber industry, grazing industry and other commercial forest users were at stake on one hand and preserving the forests and all that goes with forests was at stake on the other side.  There wasn’t much veracity in the extreme arguments from either side, the positions were so hard set there was little room in the middle for reasonable discussion.   A very serious side effect is, good science has been lost, or compromised, as a part of the decision making in the heated economic, political and legal arguments.   The Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act turned out to be not specific enough to give strong management direction.  Environmentalists, Wilderness advocates, recreationists , the timber industry, grazing industry and anyone else having any financial or emotional interest in forests were using their influences with Congress and the public to demand what they wanted from the National Forests.   Arguments were, too often, reduced to one-line sound-bites for public consumption, natural resource issues are far too complex for that.  The tools were lobbying for new laws, control over Forest Service budgets and legal challenges to forest policies, management and projects. The Forest Service was being whip-lashed from every direction and good science was too complex to have a place in the policy making.

Earlier, leaders in American forest thinking had come from the Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, Aldo Leopold, Arthur Carhart, Bob Marshall had forward looking visions of the value of forests and how they could be managed to meet people’s needs in the present and in the future.  They thought, they wrote, they spoke, they worked, they led, they communicated with the public and and they formed sound direction for our nation’s forests.   After the World War II, it seems there was little leadership from the Forest Servicer or other government agencies concerning our forests.  Politics, new laws, annual budgets, lawsuits and judges’ actions became the way of making forest decisions and policy.  Science was being left out of the discussion, it was lost in the minutia of litigation details and the Forest Service was too compromised to get forest science into the decision-making arena.

Congress was lobbied by conflicting forest interest groups to pass laws favoring the lobbyists particular interest.  Congress responded, as it often does, by passing laws the lobbyists wanted.  Many of these laws are short sighted, short purposed, and conflict with previous laws and direction.  But Congress always has an out for laws that are conflicting or become a problem because they were passed for political purposes.  When it comes time to develop the budget, Congress simply doesn’t allocate money to implement the law they previously passed.  That makes it become the agencies’ problem.  If the lobbying group that wanted the law complains that nothing is being done on the ground, the congressperson  can, and does, blame the agency.   Not a shining example of leadership.

The universities and the Society of American Foresters have had little appetite for entering the public fray.  They continue publishing new science findings, but seldom speak up for science having a voice in managing forest resources.

Forests & People - Environment and Logging, 1960's Pictures

Environmental Concerns 

As the National Forests were required to supply more of the nation’s wood the public became more and more concerned about the impacts of logging on public lands.  The more of it they saw, the less they liked it. 

Clearcut in Oregon Coast Range, early 1960's

Getting wood out of mountain forests is not a pretty business.  Unlike farming with the big machines moving in a straight line across a flat landscape harvesting wheat or corn, harvesting mature trees is more like violence and chaos.  Towering trees are cut, crashing down, tops and limbs are smashed and scattered, the logs are skidded (drug) by tractors, or cables suspended from tree spars or metal towers, to a central landing.  There the logs are loaded onto trucks, hauled down narrow, mountain logging roads to highways and on to sawmills.  It’s a big, rollicking, stay-outta-my-way business.

Glen getting ready to "top" a spar tree.

After logging, a wooded area is scared by skid trail, stumps, limbs and tree tops (slash) scattered helter-skelter and a maze of roads. The beauty of the area is lost and, unlike harvesting wheat or corn, it will take years before beauty is reestablished by new trees.   The forest’s beauty will come back, young trees, vigorous, colorful and growing toward maturity will do it, but it takes a good chunk of a person’s lifetime to happen, so it’s a hard thing to accept - and wait for.

Good forestry practices set money aside from the sale of logs to take care of the land and get a new forest growing.   Slash (the limbs and tree tops) is burned, or cut in small pieces and scattering so decomposition will return the nutrients to the soil.  This reduces the possibility of future fires by reducing the fuels.  Good logging operations construct water bars on skid trails and little used roads to prevent soil erosion, they spread grass seed on roads and skid trails and they replant small trees or leave strong mature trees to reseed the logged area naturally.  Well-designed tree harvesting practices leave areas along streams untouched to protect the water and keep it cool for

Glen, on the way up.

fish.  Even where these good procedures are done, it is several years until a logged area will be judged beautiful by most of us. 

It’s the ugliness that is offensive, not the science, the harvesting procedures, the water bars, new grass or planted trees.  The problem is, it takes decades for tree seedlings to become a forest and in today’s world, we want results — fast! 

Harvesting trees generally breaks down into two methods, clearcutting and partial cutting.  Cearcutting, cutting all the trees on an area, is the ugliest.  However, there are a couple reasons for using this method of timber harvesting:  (1)  Some species of trees need full sunlight to reestablish and grow, these species need either a fire or clearcutting to perpetuate themselves.  Lodgepole pine in the Rocky Mountains and Douglas fir on the west coast are examples. (2) On mountainsides too steep for tractors, logging systems that use cables suspended high above the ground  and can lift logs and pull them up steep slopes to a landing without scaring the soil are necessary.  These cable logging systems normally operate in clearcuts.  

Topping it.

So, what’s so bad about clearcuts, especially if they just imitate a fire in nature?  Again, the problem is how clearcuts look, they can get too big to fit the landscape, they can extend to a straight property lines that looks unnatural on a mountainside, and the roads.  Roads and straight lines are not natural in a forest and on a mountain, they look terrible.  These ill effects can be mitigated with good forestry practices, for example:  make clearcuts  less than 40 acres; have cutting boundaries follow natural land features, ridges, creeks, etc.; minimize roads and rehabilitate them when logging is done; burn the slash, and replant trees.  These practices reestablish a healthy forest, create good wildlife habitat, and are not so visually invasive on the landscape.  Even with good harvesting plans and practices, the name “clearcutting” has the stigma of being bad and it has stuck because harvesting a pretty stand of trees results in a period of ugliness. 

Partial cutting is a silvicultural system that removes only selected trees and leaves many standing, it can be used with tree species that have intermediate tolerance to shade because the small trees can become established and grow in the partial shade. The problem is, this kind of logging can’t be done on steep ground, the tractors would cause severe soil erosion and it is too dangerous to operate the track or wheel skidding machines on steep ground.   It is also more expensive to partial cut an area because it takes significantly more time.  The tree fallers have to be careful not to hit standing trees with the one they are falling and the big machines dragging logs from the woods have to be careful not to damage the trees left standing, in other words, the logging takes skill and care, but where partial cutting can be used the result can soon be a more attractive forest than existed before the logging. 

The spar, a cable goes out from the
pulley (block) at the top and
skids logs to the landing.
The block is 5 feet in diameter.

Securing the load with "binders."

Newly logged clearcut, 1963,  today it is a stand of
healthy growing Douglas fir trees.

Heading down the road.

Down there's the road

Logs are dumped in the river and made into rafts.

Log rafts being pulled down river to the mill.

Forest management: old growth on the left
new growth to the right,
new cutting unit in front of the pickup