Thrashing through wall of brush and planted Ponderosa pine plantations, I found myself deep in a blast from the past. After twenty-five years, I returned to my former life as a Forest Service Timber Stand Improvement (TSI) Forester. My Forest Service past has caught up to my Forest Service present.
Early in my career on the Klamath National Forest, I would dawn my rubber rain pants in the drizzling rain and slip across logging slash attempting to count the trees per acre of fir and pine. I estimated the percent cover ceanthous and madrone, and guessed the extent of tan oak and poison oak. It was starting to come back to me… “Thin the conifers to 250 trees per acre; cut the brush,” and hope for the best.
Plantation in the Westside Plantation Project, Shasta-Trinity National Forest
As the Timber Stand Improvement (TSI) Forester in the 1980’s, I oversaw all aspects of pre-commercial thinning, aerial application of herbicides, backpack application of herbicides, and the chainsaw release of planted plantations. After an area was logged and cleared and planted with baby trees, I was responsible for examining plantations for treatment needs, evaluating treatment effectiveness, writing prescriptions, coordinating Forest Service and public input, writing the vegetation management environmental assessment, preparing and writing contracts, setting treatment priorities, selecting projects, supervising workers, inspecting contracts, and recommending future targets and budget.
I was the Contracting Officers Representative (COR) for service contracts to get the work done, and I supervised inspectors, negotiated with contractors, and I directed work for two Forest Service brush disposal crews. Using my new fresh-out-of-college scientific forestry skills, I organized, supervised and completed the inventory of 2,500 acres of plantations and I updated prescriptions and scheduled inventories for over 1,500 acres of plantations. I was very proud of my work developing the district’s first plan to inventory all TSI units on a regular scheduled basis. I was growing the forest of the future.
Now, twenty -five year later, I was returning so some of the plantations that filled my early career. I wasn’t on the Klamath, but just up the Trinity River to the neighboring Shasta- Trinity National Forest. These babies were the same age as the little tikes I was stuffing in the ground – brown down and green up at the early years of my forestry career. The offspring have grown, and they were now tall and healthy and ready to burn to the ground if something isn’t done soon to help them weather the firestorms that burned through many of their neighbors earlier this year.
The summer of 2008 was not pretty for the Shasta-T. Fires tore through forest investments, and threatened local communities. Bit by bit, the forest was thinning its plantations, but they wanted to package up one big project so that they could get priority when funding was made available to do the needed silvicultural treatments.
In June 2008, I was contracted by the Shasta-Trinity National Forest to lead the interdisciplinary analysis of the Westside Plantation Project, a proposal designed to reduce fuels and improve forest health and resiliency on 33,000 acres of National Forest system land. The project proposes thinning and fuels reduction in plantations, or managed stands, within the Trinity River Basin. Specific vegetation treatments proposed include both hand and mechanical thinning, and the project will be completed over a ten year period. The goal is to reduce the risk of stand-replacing wildfire, provide for community protection, and promote the development of habitat for Threatened, Endangered, and Forest Service Sensitive species. Plantations proposed for treatment range in age from 21 to 55 years, most originated after harvesting and regeneration (planting) within the last 40 years. These plantations are currently over-dense (300-1500 or more trees per acre) and considered to be at risk to various forest pathogens and stand-replacing wildfire.
During my first five years of my forestry career, I took care of freshly planted trees, and now, I am developing plans to protect and enhance California’s future forests. My career has come full circle.
“Sid Vicious” ID Team Fuels Specialist with the Shasta-T’s
Silviculturist and the AMSET Wildlife Biologist in the background.
In October, from across the state, five interdisciplinary team members for this project gathered in beautiful Hayfork, California, to see that we had viewed in GIS layers and maps, and tables of the forest’s plantations. Passing the closed lumber mill, and empty business we piled into a monster of a green Forest Service six-pack truck, Under cloudy, drizzly skies we drove on the the logging roads of yore. We were on a mission to see the character and form of these young trees and look toward their future. Amid the brush and logging debris, the trees of my past were still growing and still needed help.
In addition to having TSI flashbacks, we found another relic of the northern California national forests – the abandoned pot plantation. There in a little depression next to a small meadow, surrounded by planted pines, were the remains of someone’s marijuana garden. Chicken wire hastily strapped to snow poles in a 20′x30′ rectangle in the middle of nearly no-where, someone had their pot plants watered and cultivated and harvested among the ponderosa pines of our future forests.
Bob Hawkins inspecting someone’s abandoned marijuana garden.
Things change, and they stay the same. It is a comfort and a disappointment. As my career moved along, and my life developed, so did the trees. They got bigger and denser and will continue to grow and mature long after my career with the Forest Service has finished. I would like to think that I have been a part of their development, yet, something tells me that all our scientific forestry doesn’t really mean much without the test of time. In forestry, and in life, hope and time are a big part of the Big Picture.