April was full. Full of work. Full of rain. Full of messes and clean up. Full of hope for the drought to end. Full of dread for the oncoming onslaught of summer heat. Full of gratitude for too many things to name here. Full of leaves bursting open, flowers blooming, bees scrounging for early nectar.
It was not full of me writing to you. And here’s why:
With the unexpected rain, we now have an extended window to prepare for the upcoming fire season. In the past two years, this land had over twenty old-growth Ponderosa pine trees die from lack of water and beetle kill - both problems exacerbated by the other.
The canopy on this sixteen-acre land is dense, extensive, and until 2020 was healthy and intact. The towering Pondos that didn’t make it, died from the top down, leaving branches loaded with crispy brown needles - the equivalent of gasoline - swaying among other healthy tree tops.
With the help of a couple of neighbors and a tractor, we began the process of dropping dead or dying trees. Which left a righteous mess. My job? Brush piling.
The Sawyer limbed fallen tree trunks then cut them in 10-12 foot lengths. Those logs are stacked in a deck that will later be milled with an Alaskan sawmill. Basically, a chainsaw strapped to a frame for making roughcut planks, transforming dead pine trees into gorgeous blue-stained pine siding. At least something good will come from this carnage.
I counted tree rings on one of the largest stumps, and my very unscientific conclusion brought me to 188 years. It was one of six trees roughly the same age. Related. Family. Born somewhere in the vicinity of 1834. Gone in a matter of two years from drought. Climate change. Too much CO2 in the atmosphere. Not enough concern from humans to curb habits, lifestyle, consumption. I drive a gas guzzling, carbon belching vehicle like most of us on planet earth, so this sapblood is on my hands too.
I remember driving through Banff Provincial Park in Canada a few years ago on my way to Alaska, and witnessed vast swaths of dead trees carpeting the mountainsides, especially on the road to Jasper. It choked me up. Such stunning mountain terrain devastated by a tiny tree beetle is a lesson in humility.
If we leave the trees standing on this land, eventually they come to the same demise. So we take them down in a controlled way, hoping to avert the disaster of someone walking beneath one of these giants when it lays its tired body on the ground.
While we were at it, we harvested a longtime dead old-growth oak tree with an impressive colony of turkey tail mushrooms living on it. I would have been content to leave the old thing standing for turkey tail habitat, but it was within striking distance of the driveway and the trail to my house. I placed a portion of the striped colony at the base of another old-growth oak that is living, with the hope that some part of this masterpiece will live on.
This was the first leg of what will likely be a three-part journey to finish the job. It’s slow doing the work by hand and small tractor. But I prefer that over larger machinery tearing up the moist forest floor.
April was full. Full of work. Full of rain. Full of messes and clean up. Full of hope for the drought to end. Full of sore muscles, dirty jeans, and existential guilt. Full of trees falling, tractors pulling, ring counting, and sapblood on my hands.
Photos by Author
Thanks for putting this in perspective. Seeing the photos makes it all so real because walking through it puts you in the middle of it and you can't see the big picture. So much work but we're getting it and one day it'll be a healthy forest once again. ❤️
The main idea is to save the good trees and help them. You did a good job. I like the words you spoke of using the small tractor and human labour rather than the larger machines that would further destroy and gouge the earth.