Fifty years after the storm ripped through the Pacific Northwest, meteorologists still marvel at its might. “There has yet to be another tempest that even comes close to the furor of the Columbus Day Storm,” said Steve Pierce, president of the Oregon Chapter of the American Meteorological Society. This storm was so violent, and so unprecedented, that it changed not only the forests of the Northwest, but also the way the economy and the culture around them functions—and its effects continue to be felt today.

The Columbus Day Storm reshaped the Pacific Northwest timber industry, which had been the mainstay of the region’s economy since the mid-19th century. Blowing down vast swaths of trees, the storm prompted an explosion of roadbuilding to help loggers reach fallen timber, giving birth to a new log-export trade with Asia, and causing timberland owners to change the way they manage forests under the threat of natural disasters. These new forestry practices, in turn, inspired an environmental movement that remains a powerful counterforce in the region today.

The storm hit some of the mightiest conifer forests known to man: the softwood forests of the Pacific Northwest that cover roughly half of the land mass in Washington and Oregon. Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) is the dominant species in the region. A heavy-limbed evergreen tree with a trunk that can reach diameters of 10 feet or more, it can tower higher than 200 feet. If left alone, a Douglas fir can live five centuries or more.

When American conservationist John Muir visited Puget Sound in 1888, he marveled at the ancient trees that pressed “forward to the water … coming down from the mountains far and near to offer themselves to the axe, making the place a perfect paradise for the lumberman.”
And indeed, the lumbermen came in droves. By 1910, the U.S. Bureau of Corporations reported, 63 percent of working people in Washington owed their jobs to the forestry industry, directly or indirectly, and the state had become the nation’s top timber producer. A few decades later, Oregon’s logging business would surpass Washington’s, but by 2017 Oregon and Washington still ranked first and second, respectively, in lumber production in the United States.

Over the years, the logger’s axe gave way to chain saws, and fallen timber that once made its way to sawmills over rivers began traveling on trains and logging trucks. Twenty years before the epic windstorm, only about 40 percent of the 200-year-and-older trees in Washington were still standing. By 1962, any old-growth trees that remained were mostly at hard to reach elevations above 2,000 feet.

The forested landscape was still vast, but it was interrupted by a creeping checkerboard of clear-cuts and lightly managed forests. On tens of thousands of acres, trees gave way to postwar, suburban sprawl—housing subdivisions, strip malls, and parking lots. In the meantime, private timber companies and state and federal agencies scrambled to meet an insatiable appetite for wood products, including trusses, beams, flooring, plywood, particleboard, pulp, and paper.

Even in such a somewhat-thinned landscape, the Columbus Day Storm packed a brutal punch. Hurricane-force winds chewed their way through more than half of the region’s remaining forests, tearing down enough wood to build a million homes—an estimated 15 billion board feet of timber (a board foot is the measure of the usable wood in a tree, equivalent to a piece of lumber one foot long, one foot wide, and one inch thick.)

As dawn broke on October 13, 1962 in Pacific Northwest timber country, locals began to get a sense of the storm’s toll. “I don’t suppose I’m going to be going hunting this year,” Glen Hawley, a forestry manager in southwest Washington, mused to his boss that morning, which was the opening day of deer hunting season. Hawley was right. He would be preoccupied by timber salvage operations for months. Hawley’s Kelso District typically yielded a harvest of 40 million board feet of timber per year, but over the next three years his crews would clear away nearly 22 times that amount.

Salvage operations needed to move quickly to ward off a crippling infestation of the Douglas-fir beetle, which would lay eggs in the dead timber. Those eggs would morph into young adult beetles, emerging in the spring of 1964 eager to devour standing timber, too. On October 15, timberland owners met in Portland to figure out how to get as much wood as possible off the ground over the next 18 months.

The other major threat was wildfire fueled by the downed timber, which was everywhere. Washington state forester Roy Friis described what it was like to navigate the forest floor. “A lot of times you were ten or twenty feet off the ground, walking on fallen trees and limbs. You could cruise all day without your feet touching the ground,” he said.

Men clearing the forests worked unencumbered by regulations to protect fish, wildlife, and water quality—those all came along in the ensuing decades. “The good ol’ boys went to the back room, had a couple of beers and decided what to do,” recalled Kenhelm Russell, a Washington state forester who chaired the October 15 meetings. Timber sales took place practically immediately. On the rain-soaked Siuslaw National Forest along the Oregon coast, the first sale was advertised just four days after the storm.

The hasty cleanup ignited a flurry of roadbuilding. The Weyerhaeuser Company, a private timber giant based in Washington state, estimated that as much as 70 percent of the three billion board feet of storm-damaged timber on its property could not be reached without new roads. In the Siuslaw National Forest, the network of logging roads grew by more than 35 percent.

All of this activity resulted in a timber glut that transformed the marketplace. The volume of timber blown over by the Columbus Day Storm far exceeded the capacity of mills in the Pacific Northwest and other domestic markets, so the industry turned to Japan, a country that needed wood to fuel its own growing, post-World War II economy, and which had ample mill capacity but scant timber supplies.

For Japan, the Columbus Day Storm was a perfect storm. Seemingly overnight, the 375 million board feet shipped from the Pacific Northwest to Japan in 1961 steadily rose to two billion board feet in 1968. By 1988, the figure was 3.5 billion board feet. This rapid growth in the log export market was controversial. Timber companies, longshoremen, and free trade boosters were thrilled, because logs sold in Asia commanded higher prices than those sold domestically. But small mill owners and conservationists decried the loss of raw material for local mills, and worried about preserving the old forestry culture of the region.

The Columbus Day Storm delivered a dramatic reminder that forestland owners’ harvest plans could be upended overnight by a mighty windstorm or wildfire—and as a result the practices of the timber industry were transformed. High-yield forestry emerged, designed to grow trees faster and boost the volume of wood per acre. With Weyerhaeuser paving the way, timberland owners grew tree seedlings in controlled orchard settings, keying on genetically superior seed stock. They began fertilizing the forest soil, thinning tree stands to promote vigorous growth, and spraying herbicides broadly to combat brush and unwanted trees, including alder.

By 1975, Weyerhaeuser’s high-yield forests in the Pacific Northwest were growing twice as much wood as unmanaged forests, and breathing new life into what had been a shrinking business. “The Columbus Day Storm jumpstarted the timber industry,” noted Bob Dick, a forester whose father, Malcolm Dick, helped establish Weyerhaeuser’s Japanese log export market. “It forced landowners to really start managing their lands.”

But as high-yield forestry took hold, a newly ecological view of the region’s forests grew, too. Buoyed by federal laws such as the 1972 Clean Water Act and 1973 Endangered Species Act, conservation groups began working to save what remained of the Pacific Northwest’s old-growth forests. By the end of the 20th century, timber harvesting on federal land in the region had ground nearly to a halt, reducing regional timber harvests by some 50 percent.

The spate of roadbuilding for logging, spurred by the Columbus Day Storm, also brought environmental destruction. The roads, many carved out of hillsides at high elevations, served as conduits during rainstorms, delivering tons of sediment to rivers and streams, and smothering salmon spawning habitat critical to the recovery of depleted salmon runs. By the 1990s, public and private timberland owners were spending tens of millions of dollars to decommission orphaned and substandard roads, many of them the by-products of the Columbus Day Storm. The road removal budget for some timberland owners equaled what they spent on new, more fish-friendly roads.

Today in the Pacific Northwest two big outgrowths of the storm—high-yield forestry and old-growth environmentalism—share an uneasy truce in the face of climate change. Scientists predict that global warming will lead to more frequent and intense wildfires in the Pacific Northwest. The forests of the region have proven resilient in the past when confronted by severe weather. They will be tested again.

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Dear California Trees,

When are you going to stand up and take some responsibility for all the damage you do to this state?

It’s not only the blue-purple blossoms that you jacarandas use to stain Californians’ cars, or the colonies of disease-carrying rats that you palms harbor, or even the roots you magnolias use to keep messing up the sidewalks on my street. It’s not even that your out-of-control-fires foul California’s air, destroy homes, and drain the state budget.

No, what most upsets me is that, instead of being accountable for the trouble you cause, you leave us humans to solve all your problems. You trees are more aloof than any Hollywood star. Do you think the Lorax from Dr. Seuss is going to show up to speak for you? Or do you think you’re magical heroes, like the trees from The Lord of the Rings?

The only reason you get away with this irresponsibility is your millions of human apologists, who constantly shift blame away from you flora and onto us fauna.

We are told that the stuff you trees do is really the fault of environmentalists who make it hard to cull you, or loggers who cut down too many of you, or utilities who don’t keep you guys away from their power lines, or government agencies who don’t properly manage you, or rural homeowners who insist on living among you in the wilderness, or even the homeless who seek shelter among you.

Your defenders even rail against human overpopulation! That’s pretty rich when you recognize the reality: This state is much more yours than it is ours. There are 4 billion live trees in California—100 times more than the mere 40 million people who live under your rule. And you dominate geographically, with forests covering one-third of the state’s land mass.

Now, to your credit, you in the forestlands pull your weight in some ways: You provide opportunities for recreation and contemplation. You store carbon, helping limit climate change. And a big shout-out to you trees in the Sierra: You collect and store the snowpack that California humans depend on for water and, while you’re at it, you filter pollutants out of runoff and reduce erosion that would send sediments into our streams.

But, lately, trees, your job performance has been slipping.

Why? It starts with your total failure to plan for self-defense, a lack of foresight that looks like some combination of laziness and grift, as you profited from the good nature of humans while shortchanging us in the process.

You exploited our fire suppression policies in order to grow far too great in number. And while humans did you the favors of reducing our birth rate and limiting development (not to mention giving up newspapers), you grew everywhere, creating forests with 10 times more trees per acre than a century ago. And while that might have been OK if you’d produced the grand and majestic trees that you once did, instead you gave us small, flimsy imposters. (Many of you are also non-natives—unauthorized immigrants—but let’s not get too much into that here, lest ICE try to deport you.)

Today’s overcrowded forests are more vulnerable to drought and diseases. Exhibit A is the drought and the infestation of bark beetles that caused an estimated 129 million California trees to die between 2010 and 2017.

And did you responsibly clean up your dead? No. Instead, deceased trees fell onto buildings, roads, and power lines, while littering the forests and fueling apocalyptic fires that burned for months. To take just one example, 2017’s Wine Country fires killed 22 people and caused $8 billion in damage and destruction—more than the state’s annual investment in the University of California—torching 14,000 homes, 4,000 commercial buildings, and 3,200 cars.

Such fires extinguished much of the goodwill you built with your environmental work. After all, mega-fires have badly lowered air and water quality you trees are supposed to protect, while emitting carbon you’re supposed to store.

To reverse these trends, your forests must be thinned, with smaller or diseased trees removed so that larger healthy trees survive. This is hard and costly work because you trees tend to die in inaccessible places. But do you help us humans with massive and money-losing thinning projects across such huge swaths of California? Do you tax yourselves to cover the costs of making the forests healthy? No, just like California’s human taxpayers, you seem to think that someone else will pay to manage and restore the forests.

Your lack of leadership on tree issues has created a void that has been filled by polarized human politics. It’s sad. Once, you trees—especially the great coastal redwoods and the signature sequoias like General Sherman—were great unifiers. But today you just fuel the partisan fires.

When Governor Brown proposed regulatory changes to speed up forest thinning, he got mostly grief. Environmental groups said thinning would just ease logging practices that harm forests, and argued that wildfires are more the fault of grasslands and that dastardly chaparral than of you trees. At the same time, logging-minded folks and homeowners in the North State suggested they needed more freedom from environmental regulation to cull the forest. That descended into all kinds of other arguments, including how responsible utilities should be for wildfires that stem from their power lines.

Meanwhile, you trees, in failing to address your own problems, even gave an opening to the political arsonist in the White House, who blamed environmental lawsuits for not getting rid of more fire-prone trees. This was dishonest scapegoating, since most of our tree problems are on federal lands that his government fails to manage adequately.

Reflexively, humans blame themselves and not you for such problems. I’ve seen some commentary about state agencies not moving fast enough to address tree problems. But that’s not true. Years ago, Governor Brown saw this problem emerging and convened a Tree Mortality Task Force that comprised state agencies, local governments, scholars, utilities, emergency services, and pretty much every stakeholder in our forests except you trees.

Without the task force’s work on maintenance and dead tree removal, the tree situation in California would undoubtedly be worse. It might have helped if you trees had demanded a much greater budget allocation for the tree crisis, but you preferred to remain quiet.

You can’t play shy anymore. The truth is that California’s tree problems may have become too big for humans. For us to help you, we’d have to come together as never before to engage in long-term collaborations to restore our massive forestlands, to find significant new funds for managing forests, and to embrace very different systems for fire prevention and land preservation. That kind of thoughtful, far-sighted governance has been impossible for California even when it comes to housing ourselves or educating our children, so it’s unlikely we’ll get our act together to save you trees.

Which is why, California trees, it’s time for you to face the same reality that confronts every interest group. If you want to solve your problems in this state, you trees will have to do the work yourselves.

The post California’s Trees Need to Stop Just Standing There appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Fall foliage and hurricane season go hand in hand in New England. But what few people realize is that the spectacular blazing colors from our hardwood forests are the result of the great hurricane of 1938, which brought 100 mph winds inland to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine 79 years ago on September 21.

The storm that came to be known as “Thirty-Eight” (the system of naming hurricanes didn’t begin until 1953) was the first Category 2 hurricane to reach Vermont and New Hampshire, and it came without warning. Thirty-Eight made landfall on Long Island, crossed the Long Island Sound into Connecticut and Rhode Island, and raced through Massachusetts and Vermont. It had been at least a generation since any hurricane had hit the region, even the coast.

Because of the lack of warning, or preparedness, more than 600 people died, most of them from the storm surge that swept beachfront houses into the sea. Floods and high winds—the fiercest wind was measured near Boston at 186 miles per hour—destroyed roads, bridges, houses, barns, and railroad tracks.

Inland, these winds uprooted nearly 1,000 square miles of forest, ripping holes in the tree canopy ranging from the size of a city yard to as large as 90 acres. And in doing so, the hurricane created a new forest across much of New England.

Most of the people who lived through the hurricane are gone, but I have been fortunate to hear the stories of many of them. One dramatic story came from Fred Hunt, at the time a 14-year-old boy playing hooky in the woods in Rindge, New Hampshire. Late in the day, a huge pine—more than 100 feet tall—was uprooted and landed five steps behind him, its trunk parallel to the ground. Thinking quickly, he scrambled into the space beneath the trunk of the fallen pine and stayed there for 10 minutes while the winds howled mercilessly and blew down every other tree in the forest. When there were no more trees left standing, Fred scrambled through the tangle of downed trees the last half-mile to home.

The white pine that served as Fred’s refuge happened to be growing in that spot because of the history of the area’s land, which was typical of much of rural New Hampshire and Massachusetts. In the 17th and 18th centuries, farmers cleared most of the original forest to grow crops and raise livestock. With the advance of the Industrial Revolution, these farmers left to work in the mills. Starting in 1860, the cleared fields reverted to forests. In New England, there’s no need to replant trees because they happily grow on their own. One of the most prolific colonizers of farm fields is white pine.

So when Thirty-Eight raged through, forests covered 80 percent of the land in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and much of that forest was white pine. Before the storm, many rural families saw their woodlots as living bank accounts, where a few trees could be cut and sold when they needed money. Ninety percent of the trees that were blown down were white pine.

With the disaster, the federal government saw a need to get involved. The Great Depression had not yet ended, and in the forested areas of New England the New Deal make-work programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) were well-established. Fearing the kind of fires seen in the West each summer, the U.S. Forest Service directed the WPA and CCC to strip the downed trees of their branches, twigs, and needles to reduce the fire danger. Simultaneously it created the Northeast Timber Salvage Administration to purchase logs from the blowdown. Five times the annual harvest of trees had been blown down in a five-hour period, creating a huge glut of wood. NETSA created a market for the logs and purchased nearly half of the salvageable timber, providing some income to the 30,000 families that otherwise would have lost their woodland bank accounts.

And so, New England’s largest hurricane was followed by its largest logging job, and this one-two punch brought about the forest that we see today. When the towering canopy of white pine blew down, what was left were the seedlings and saplings of deciduous hardwood trees. If they hadn’t been blown down in 1938, those pines might still be there, holding the ground until they died from wind, disease, or logging. Instead, the mix of maple, birch, and oak that relished the new sunlight (having been released from the shade of the pines) grew vigorously. This new forest closely approximates the species mix of the original forest that had greeted the settlers, and its vibrant display of turning leaves attracts leaf peepers from around the globe.

Not all of New England experienced Thirty-Eight the same way. In Vermont, for example, farming had continued well into the 1930s, so only half of the state was covered in forests. So hurricane damage appeared mostly in woodlots on top of ridges and in the sugar maple orchards that produced the springtime crop of maple syrup. Maple syrup was a hugely important crop in Vermont, because dairy farmers used the income from syrup to pay a year’s wages for hired help. With so many sugar orchards laying in ruins, many Vermont farmers had no choice but to get out of farming. The regrowth of the forest began in Vermont 80 years later than in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and the process was different because Vermont’s soils are better than those of its neighbors. Vermont’s forest cover has now reached 80 percent, and the vast majority of it is the mix of northern hardwoods—maple, beech, and birch—that makes the hills come alive in the fall.

When I last spoke to Fred Hunt, just months before he died at 87, he said, “I’ve always been a white pine man.” He told me that after graduating with a degree in forestry from the University of New Hampshire, he ran a logging business for 10 years, specializing in thinning pine plantations. He then earned an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts studying white pine and its effect on the water supply. Along the way, his master’s thesis served as the first management plan for the 58,000-acre forest surrounding Quabbin Reservoir, which provides the drinking water for Boston and 40 other nearby towns. He then taught forest management and managed a large forest deep in the Adirondacks for 10 years before he decided at the age of 54 to make his final career change, moving back to Reading, Vermont and tending his own forest.

Hunt spent a lifetime working to grow superior white pine because it provided a good living and because he loved the practice of forestry. But it’s possible that his lifelong affinity for white pine could have little to do with money or forestry. It could have more to do with an event when he was 14 years old. On that day, as New England’s most destructive hurricane passed through, a white pine saved his life.

The post The 1938 Hurricane That Revived New England’s Fall Colors appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The images are gripping. Horizons glow with satanic reds squishing through black and bluish clouds, as though the sky itself were bruised and bleeding. Foregrounds bristle with scorched neighborhoods still drifting with smoke and streams of frightened refugees, a scene more commonly associated with war zones.

But we’ve seen this before. Big fires are big fires, and one pyrocumulus can look pretty much like another. Communities with homes burned to concrete slabs, molten hulks of what once were cars alongside roads, surrounding forests mottled with black and green— these are becoming commonplaces.

What strikes me most about those Fort McMurray images making their way down from western Canada is the mashup of foreground and background, the collision of free-burning flames with a fossil-fuel powered society. The first form of burning dates back to the early Devonian, when life first colonized the continents. The second tracks the Anthropocene, when humanity changed its combustion habits and wrenched the Earth into a new order. At places like Fort McMurray the deep past and the recent present of fire on Earth rush together with almost Shakespearean urgency.
 

***

 
The plot is old, the stage setting and cast of players updated.

Monster fires are no stranger in the boreal forest. It’s a fire-ravenous biota that burns in stand-replacing patches. This is not a landscape where misguided fire suppression has upset the rhythms of surface burning and catapulted flames into the canopy. They’ve always been in the canopy and everything has adapted accordingly. White and black spruce and jack pine and aspen experience exactly the kind of fire they require.

How big those patches get depends on how dry the fuel is, how brisk the winds, and how extensive the forest. In northern Alberta there is not much to break a full-throated wildfire. The Chinchaga fire started on June 1, 1950, and burned across northeastern British Columbia and most of Alberta until October 31, a total of 3 million acres.

Nor is a burning city a novelty. In North America the wave of settlement in the 18th and 19th centuries paralleled a wave of fire. The surrounding lands were disturbed, and frequently alight with both controlled and uncontrolled fires. The towns were built of wood—basically, reconstituted forests. The same conditions that propelled fires through the landscape pushed them through towns.

Only a century ago did those urban conflagrations finally quell as urbanites turned to less combustible materials; fire codes and zoning regulations organized buildings in ways that discouraged spreading flames; fire services acquired the mechanical muscle to halt blazes early; and the wave of settlement flattened. Over the past century it’s taken earthquakes or wars to overcome these reforms in modern cityscapes, and unleash widespread conflagrations.

Meanwhile, a broadly rural scene morphed and polarized into an urban frontier of wildlands and cities that faced one another without intervening buffers. The middle, working landscapes, like the middle, working classes, shriveled at the expense of the favored extremes. In 1986 the term wildland-urban interface appeared. It was a clumsy, dumb phrase, but it referred to a dumb problem. Watching houses, and then communities burn was like watching polio or plague return. This was a problem we had solved, then forgot to—or chose not to—continue the vaccinations and hygiene that had halted their terrors.

Initially, the problem appeared a California pathology. But it soon broke out of quarantine and has spread across western North America. The prevailing narrative held that the problem was stupid Westerners building houses where there were fires. Most of the vulnerable communities, however, are in the Southeastern U.S., and if climate change modelers are correct, we will see the fires moving to where the houses are. That will make it a national narrative. In truth, the problem is international, each country with its own quirky combination of fire-quickening factors. Mediterranean France, Portugal, Greece, South Africa, and Australia are experiencing similar outbreaks. North America has no monopoly over catastrophic conflagrations.

It’s tempting to appeal to climate change as the common cause. Yet the burning bush and scorched town are joined not just by global climate change, but by a global economy, and a global commitment to fossil-fuel firepower. That makes the issue both more pervasive and, paradoxically, more amenable to treatment. It means that, while there is one grand prime mover, there are many levers and gears. Fire is a reaction that takes its character from its context. It’s a driverless car barreling down the road, synthesizing everything around it.

The enduring images of the Fort Mac fire may, in fact, be its cars. Car-propelled flight, cars stranded for lack of gas, cars melted in garages, evacuation convoys halted due to 60 meter flames, relief convoys laden with gasoline. It isn’t only what comes out of the tailpipe that matters, but how those vehicles have organized human life in the boreal. The engagement (or not) with the surrounding bush. The kind of land use that cars encourage. The kind of industry that must develop to support those cars. The kind of city that such an industry needs to sustain it. The oil sand industry that has shaped the contours of modern Fort McMurray is in turn shaped by the internal-combusting society it feeds.

So there are really two fires burning around and into Fort McMurray. One burns living landscapes. The other burns lithic landscapes, which is to say, biomass buried and turned to stone in the geologic past. The two fires compete: one or the other triumphs. At any place the transition may take years, even decades, but where the industrial world persists its closed combustion will substitute for or suppress the open flames of ecosystems. The wholesale transition from the realm of living fire to that of lithic fire may stand as a working definition of the Anthropocene. Once parted they rarely meet.

At Fort McMurray they have collided with unblinking brutality. Wild fire burned away controlled fire. The old fires have forced the power plants behind the new ones to shut down and their labor force to flee. It’s like watching an open pit mine consume the town that excavates it. It’s tempting to regard the incident as a one-off, a freak of a remote landscape and a historical moment. But those collisions are becoming more frequent.

That’s not the deep worry, however. The deep horror is that the two fires may be moving from competition into collusion. They are creating positive feedback of a sort that makes more fire. Those images of fire on fire are the raw footage of a planetary phase change, what might end up as a geologic era we could call the Pyrocene. They will continue until, as Shakespeare put it, they “consume the thing that feeds their fury.”

Disaster is not always tragedy, and Fort McMurray and the industrial complex behind it may well escape lethal consequences. So if Shakespeare seems too elevated, consider Edna St Vincent Millay.

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.

We have in truth been burning both ends of our combustion candle, and if its light seems more lurid than lovely, there are yet texts to be read in the awful splendor of its illumination.

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As a lifelong Californian, I’ve grown to love the mountains so much that I’ve done volunteer work in the forests of the Sierra for the past 15 years. And over that time, I’ve seen a dramatic shift in the condition of the forests. The problems are twofold: a lack of funding and a lack of personnel.

The problem is particularly acute in the Sequoia National Forest, most easily accessed from Bakersfield or Porterville. It has no forest rangers. Let me be very clear: I do not use the word “ranger” like others, who count anyone wearing a Forest Service uniform as a ranger. What I am talking about is the absence of the traditional “ranger-naturalist” who spends his or her time tromping the trails.

These are the rangers who interact with people in the backcountry, protect our resources on the ground, maintain the structures related to trails, check permits, and help people in trouble. Interacting with such folks remains a very fond memory of my youth, and it was part of what brings me back to the mountains.

Such people are gone now. Yes, you will find a few rangers who work in the information booths and offices, where the cars park, but there is no one away from the roads. This has translated into a slow but steady degradation of the forest, and the rise of destructive visitor behavior, such as graffiti on trees or the creation of fires when conditions are dangerous.

It’s not just the rangers who are gone. The professional trail maintainers have disappeared, too. Not so long ago, teams of such people maintained trails, using only “primitive” tools like shovels and handsaws. Skills with such tools are crucial because one rule of working in Forest Service wilderness is that any kind of engine or wheeled device is prohibited. Trails can’t be maintained with chainsaws or wheelbarrows.

Why are all these skilled people gone? It’s money, of course. The Forest Service budget to the Sierra forests has been cut on an almost an annual basis, with frontline workers bearing the brunt of the cuts.

Who fills the gap? Volunteers like me. Today, all the trail maintenance done in the Sequoia National Forest is performed by a half-dozen volunteer groups, members of which spend their own time and money to get special training, buy their own tools, drive up to the forest, and work hard for days or even weeks. For example, my group, the High Sierra Volunteer Trail Crew, has restored many trails that had been left to deteriorate.

Such work has to be done. Trails are artificial things. Water washes them out, trees fall on them, and rocks crash onto them. If these problems are not fixed, trails become impassible in just a few years.

Most trails require work every year, or they deteriorate. But such maintenance doesn’t always happen. Two years ago, I led a crew to repair a portion of the remote Pacific Crest Trail, which had gotten no attention in almost a decade. This is one of our great national scenic trails, yet it took my crew of 15 two hours to find it. It was so terribly overgrown that it took 30 days of work over a three-year span to clear just a few miles of trail.

This sort of thing is not just a labor of love but also a labor of public health. Trails need maintenance not only because people wish to travel in the wilderness, but also because poorly maintained trails erode the watershed, diminishing the quality of water in Central Valley cities.

Volunteers, of course, can do only a small part of this work. At least that has been the standard thinking. But now, there are only volunteers. With no one else chipping in, we don’t merely lose access to trails. We lose trails altogether.

The trails are organized into a system, and “system trails” are required, by law, to be maintained. But when trails can’t be maintained, as is the case now, the government complies with the law by “decommissioning” poorly maintained trails from the trail system. And decommissioned trails literally disappear from maps. One of the best mapmakers for the Sierra, Tom Harrison, tells me that Forest Service personnel regularly instruct him to remove trails from his maps. Eventually, no one knows the trail was ever there.

This trend represents the ongoing loss of national resources—our trails and the access they provide. And these losses seem to be happening without public awareness or debate. Yes, there are some people who believe that wilderness areas are better off without trails or the ability of people to access them; they want the land kept pure and believe that the harder it is to get into the forests, the better. They hold as their scripture the 1964 Federal Wilderness Act, which designates areas “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.”

I read the Wilderness Act differently, since it also speaks of wilderness lands being preserved “for the people,” as places where “man himself is a visitor.” Access to our public lands is a right of all Americans, and the huge system of public lands is something that distinguishes America from most of the world’s other countries. It also makes the Central Valley a special place to live. With the decline of forests and trails, we are losing a part of California—and part of our American selves.

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