FOR THE LOVE OF TREES
Gary YoungJuly 2021
John Shanahan and I have a mutual reverence for nature and an uncompromising certainty that nuclear power is the one technology that will improve the living standards of all the worlds’ people. When it comes to the environment, I simply love trees. Perhaps that love inspired my older son to express his artistic abilities by building stunning mountain log cabins and my younger son to get his doctorate in forestry and become a professor passing on his love of trees. I am no expert as my son pointed out when I miss-identified a maple for an oak, I just like having around 225 of the big lumps of green and sometimes blue (spruce) in my Colorado yard. A while back I wrote a short history about Colorado forests and how they have been so miss-managed, and John asked me to expand the piece.
During the 1849 California gold rush, many miners passed through Colorado. Placer deposits were found near where Denver is now, but not enough to deter the “49ers” with hopes of vast riches in California. At that time all of Colorado east of the Rockies was part of the “Great American
Desert.” Not enough rain for trees but enough for grasses. Cottonwood trees grew along rivers and creeks but there were few other species. Beginning at the foothills, the Rockies were wet enough to grow conifers.
The Black Forrest between Denver and Colorado Springs was high and wet enough to grow Pondarosa pines. It was said that the pioneers could drive a team of horses and carriage travel through the forest in any direction. That openness is the sure sign of a mature forest. For example, trees are well spaced apart such that fire is not easily propagated. Lower limbs have died and dropped off because they did not have enough sun. The forest floor thick with organics that helps retain water.
Further West up the slope of the Rockies Douglas fir grow but lodge pole pine predominated. Their name came from Native Americans using the long slender trunks taken from dense stands and used for forming their buffalo hide “Teepees”. Except for the occasional dense stands, the “average” mature Colorado lodge pole pine forest of the mid 1800’s had relatively wide tree spacing and trees of all ages.
The real threat to Colorado forests started in 1859 because that was when large gold discoveries began. Instead of large placer deposits, getting the gold required hard rock underground mining. Gold camps rapidly grew
into towns needing wood for home and business construction. Underground mines needed timber cribbing to keep the rock off the miners. Lots of firewood was needed for heating, cooking and firing the growing amount of industrial machinery needed to process the ore. There were numerous mines around Breckenridge, Alma and Leadville above 9500 feet where spruces and firs start to dominate. Those elevations and above, made it harder to get wood because of the terrane and very hard winters. While stripped of all trees near the mines else where these high forests largely survived.
170 year old gold mine in Breckenridge, Colorado
It should be noted that gold was not discovered in Cripple Creek near Pikes Peak until 1890 yet more gold has come from there, (731 metric tons) than California and Alaska combined! It was because of the abundance of Colorado gold and silver that the U.S. established a mint in Denver. My grandfather came from England in about 1905 to be a gold miner in Central City. He was the family witness confirming forests for many miles around the mountain gold and silver mining areas had been stripped bare. It could have been worse for the forests if coal had not also been discovered. Of course, coal mining was underground and initially required lots of timber for cribbing. Railroads were being built which meant that forests further away were cut for ties and to supply wood for growing Colorado.
What may have saved further ravaging of the Colorado forests was General William Jackson Palmer and Dr. Bell in the 1880s not only started up the Denver and Rio Grand Railroad, they brought on metallurgical grade coal mines in southern Colorado, and a steel mill in Pueblo. The first intent was to make steel rail but another result was worn out rail and purpose built steel “jacks” were better and cheaper cribbing than heavy timbers.
Denver and Rio Grande railroad, Colorado
Significant coal was found along the Front Range and throughout Colorado. Coal became the preferred fuel for industrial purposes, home and commercial heating, and the firing of bricks that became a major home and industrial building material as lumber became more expensive. There is a downside to coal. One of my early childhood memories was the winter of 1945-46 looking towards Longmont and Boulder from our farmhouse in Weld County and seeing nothing but a big brown cloud with the Flat Irons poking up like shark fins. Using coal saved a lot of trees but even at the age of 4 I knew a big brown cloud was just not right!
It was in 1880 when there was an effort to gather data and assess the mature forests that remained along the Front Range. The interesting statistic was about 90 trees to the acre. That is compared to about 400 to 450 in the forests currently being ravaged by beetle kill!
Colorado is known for the Aspin trees shimmering in the breeze and colorful in the fall. Before the forests were denuded by the pioneers, there were few Aspin. Aspin require lots of sun and Lodge pole pine in particular does not so the first to grow was the Aspin which shaded the young pines. Once the pines grow tall they crowd out the Aspin. The problem with this second growth forest was all the trees were about the same age and grew so closely spaced that as a child I could not walk through the forest. Based on memory and measuring the trees in my yard, I estimate that there were at least one thousand and possibly up to two thousand trees per acre. In short the forests were not healthy.
I was about 9 or 10 when we went on a day trip to the mountains west of Longmont. Whole mountainsides were red! Mom told me that it was Fire Blight and of course who doesn’t believe their mom. I repeated the cause in my previous tree story to John. Research by the family tree expert Brian set the record straight. Fire Blight is a pathogen that attacks plants like roses and cherry trees but not conifers. There was a Fire Blight outbreak at the time which decimated the many cherry tree orchards around Colorado. What killed large swaths of Colorado forest in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s was the pine beetle.
Pine beetles attack the most mature trees tending to skip over the youngest. The result was the standing and fallen dead trees sheltered the young seedlings and the third growth forest grew back largely skipping the Aspin phase. The clutter on the ground and the greater age difference of the surviving trees prevented the very dense forest as before but the tree count was and is still in the range of 400 per acre. It is this closeness that is the major factor in the current beetle infestation. It is the closeness combined with beetle killed trees that made the recent forest fires so destructive.
Pine beetles have killed millions of trees in Colorado in the last twenty years.
It has been said that forests have three primary enemies, fires, insects, and logging. In fact there is just one primary enemy, ignorance. If for instance we had tried to understand why the Black Forest had not been burned or devastated by insects in the centuries before the pioneers arrived, we may have realized why it was still standing such a team and carriage could be driven between the trees.
The United States Forest Service (USFS) was founded in 1905. They were chartered to manage the forests on behalf of the citizens and for many purposes—timber, recreation, grazing, wildlife, fish and more. Fires destroy public property so it just seemed logical at the time to have a policy to prevent or quickly extinguish any forest fire. They just didn’t understand that eventually the buildup of fuel would result in truly horrendous conflagrations.
The National Park Service (NPS) was created in 1916. The agency is charged with a dual role of preserving the ecological and historical integrity of the places entrusted to its management while also making them available and accessible for public use and enjoyment. The fool’s errand was in the word preserving. Nature is constantly evolving and the forests under their
care are going to change. They also had the policy to suppress any fire –until they didn’t which resulted in the Yellowstone conflagration.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was founded in 1946 "to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations." Originally BLM holdings were described as "land nobody wanted" because homesteaders had passed them by. A lot of their holding were “scrublands” which are very susceptible to fire so BLM also adopted the “Smokey Bear” (born in 1944) approach of suppressing fire. It was considered a good idea at the time in its own right but also because BLM lands were often adjacent to forests.
The concept of controlled burns started in the 1960’s when it was realized that decades of fire suppression had allowed a buildup of fuel in the forests. It is a good idea, but it was the many small fires in Yellowstone that were thought to be “natural controlled burns” that became so out of control. The institutional risk avoidance paranoia since Yellowstone have allowed fuels in government owned land to continue building up far faster than have been mitigated by controlled burns.
Clear cut logging is as hard on Colorado forests as was the pioneers taking all the wood. In 1970 I was living in Oregon and participated in tossing Douglas fir “darts” out of an airplane to replant a clear-cut belonging to a major wood products company. A year later I walked the area and yes, many if not most of the seedlings were growing. It was done on the wet west side of Oregon and expensive. I don’t know if tree darting is still done, if companies have gone back to people hand planting, or have other methods. I don’t know if it would work in Colorado. I do know government agencies simply do not have the money to do something similar.
Son Clint logs in a preferred way. He takes standing dead of a certain size from private woodlands. He uses cables and winches taking care to not damage living trees. An average day is four or five trees and a good one is ten or eleven. A log pile of 70 peeled trees can cost up to $50,000 in labor and overhead. (Calculated when the Cameron Peak fire took the pile, the business and Clint’s log home!) Logging the way Clint does costs multiples of what a commercial logger harvesting saw timber could afford.
Ideal forestry would involve mechanical thinning to reduce the trees per acre to 90 or some better researched number. A lighting strike will hit a
tree in a thinned forest, but the tree may burn without setting others on fire. The spacing is also critical in preventing the spread of beetles. Ground fires may happen keeping forest floor fuel loads low without involving the crowns of the trees. Logging could be sustained if every dozen or more years by taking a select 30 percent or some better researched percentage of trees. I just don’t think it will happen. Lumber prices would skyrocket.
The current annual cost to just the Forest Service fighting forest fires is about $3 billion which is about half of their budget. I wonder if paying people to thin the forests would result in enough saving on fighting fires to justify the thining.
