We went for a Sunday drive out to look at a road that is being constructed. When we got nearly through the project Inklings saw all these dead trees and thought it was really ugly. So she took some pictures. At one time this was a really pretty Englemann spruce stand. Then along came the spruce beetle and riddled the trees, and then completely wiped out the spruce. I called them red spruce until they lost their needles--now they are just ugly gray spruce. The only green you see in the pictures are sub-alpine fir trees.
When I was the Ranger on the District these were taken on I prayed for a lightning strike in the middle of the three stands every night. Some day this is all going to burn and it's going to be a hot time in the old town tonight when it does.
Just for information these trees are in a roadless area and harvest and road construction are not in the cards for managing the area. Fire is really the only tool available to fix this problem.
2 comments:
I was at the north rim of the Grand Canyon last week, and saw something that I wanted to ask you about, but keep forgetting. They appear to be cleaning up the forests there, and there were stacks of dead logs every ten feet or so. Why do they stack it up like that, and what do they do with the stacks?
It is the State Road clearing their right-of-way. They stack them up and then bring in a loader and log trucks to haul them to the mill. Too bad the Forest Service can't follow suit. Gotta be frustrating to the folks that work there.
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