3 thoughts on “Increase in prescribed burning promoted”

  1. If memory serves me, sometime in the 1970s a photographer retraces Gen George A Custer’s reconnaissance of the Black Hills by a contingent of US Army Engineers a century earlier. Finds. as best he or she might, the exact spots the century earlier photographic diarist of the 19th century took the photos from. I remember a statistical enumeration that said some thing along the line of how many billion Board feet of pine in 1870s. How much USFS sold and was sawn (was it Hines Lbr who had a “working circle” 50 year contract at Spearfish and another one in the southern end of Black Hills?). And the standing inventory when the book was written in the 1970s that was double the former logging total and double the 1870s forest inventory estimate. My memory says the USFS published the book. I was by far the youngest timber buyer in the area and Jack Gates, a principal in 3-Gs Lumber In Harlan, Oregon, loaned me the Custer book to read. Likely a teaching moment.
    100 years of forest history, of weather, of consumptive use, fires, road construction and use by mining, grazing is encountered in the “after 100 years” photo essay.

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    • The book was called “Yellow Ore, Yellow Hair, Yellow Pine” by Donald Progulske — I think I still have my copy, in storage if so. This “Repeat Photography” research has been followed by several others since, and maybe most notably by the work of Charles Kay, and particularly in Yellowstone Park. When I visited Charles in his Utah home several years ago, he had thousands of repeat photography photos on file — and none of which had been scanned or otherwise digitized at that time. I still do have the 1890s surveyor’s corner post from the first timber sale in the Black Hills — it had rotted and fallen over when I visited 50 years (!) ago, at the time of the Rapid City Flood.

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  2. Sorry Jon, it’s still illegal at the Federal level, but perhaps individual states can decide on their own…
    Or individual forests, or even individual scientists in conjunction with local populations, about what is best, at the local level, based on science, not what is best based on arbitrary Federal ‘planning’ 😉

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