A riverbank improvement project West of Cody aims to save the country’s oldest ranger station from sliding into the North Fork river, while also helping Yellowstone cutthroat trout and bighorn sheep. (Courtesy: Trout Unlimited)From the Cowboy State Daily..shout-out to the Shoshone and TU! The story is not paywalled.
Crews are dropping more than 1,000 logs along the banks of the North Fork of the Shoshone River in hopes of protecting the nation’s oldest ranger station. The massive floods of 2022 caused severe erosion and the Wapiti Ranger Station is in danger of falling in.
Oldest Ranger Station
A centerpiece of the project is the Wapiti Ranger Station. Built in 1903, it was the nation’s first U.S. Forest Service ranger station built with federal money.
The bulk of the material is 1,000 logs and 400 root wads, or huge chunks of fallen trees’ root structures. The timber was taken from the Greybull River Drainage and transported to the work site by WTL Logging of Meeteetse.
Planning for the project started in January 2023 and work began in earnest in November, along a roughly two-mile stretch of the river, alongside Highway 14/16/20, which runs between Cody and the East Gate of Yellowstone National Park.
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Toward TU’s wider mission, the project should also improve habitat for prized native Yellowstone cutthroat trout.
Other fish species should benefit too, Swope said.
Two root wads are being placed with the “root fans” facing out into the river, she said.
“When the water hits the root fans, it will slow and create a deep-pool habitat,” she said.
Such pools are places where fish can rest and feed.
The area should also fill in with willows, cottonwoods and other “riparian vegetation,” Swope said.
“The goal is to create natural-looking log-jam structure along the banks,” she said.
Eventually, those should fill in with sediment from the river.
The trees and vegetation could provide food and shelter for white-tailed deer and moose.
“You don’t see many moose along the North Fork, maybe this will bring more of them there,” Swope said.
Bighorn sheep could benefit from better water sources in small, natural “pastures,” she said.
Those roadside pastures are a favored wintering ground for the sheep, she said.
1. Problems With Accessing Employee Contact Info Due to the Trump Admin?
This Mountain Journal piece made the claim that difficulty reaching folks at the FS is due to .. the Trump Admin.
Finding out who’s in charge of those regions has grown unreliable. Before President Donald Trump’s second administration began in January, each Forest Service Region had a public webpage listing contact information of its leadership and staffing
I’m sure there are other worthwhile discussion topics in that piece but access to info on employees is a sensitive subject that has been dealt with extensively by TSW and associates, without any previous apparent interest by other news outlets. It’s the only thing enough TSW-ers have agreed upon enough to send a joint letter to the Forest Service. And here was the response, as of November right after the election, but before Inauguration.
The Forest Service understands the importance of ensuring public communication with Agency employees, especially those tasked with public engagement. We maintain many different avenues for public engagement. The public can find local points of contact at fs.usda.gov by searching by unit, specific topic, or function. Staff in local offices can provide contact information as well. The Agency also uses several local and national social media accounts to engage with the public on various topics. These serve as key access points for information.
The Region 1 page is simply blank. Region 2 still has a complete page with forester and deputy foresters listed, starting with Troy Heithecker in the forester post. However, that’s an unsupported page; its redesigned website as of April doesn’t have a leadership tab. Region 4 notes that Ben Newburn is the acting regional forester for the Intermountain Region.
Region 3’s leadership page comes back “access denied.” So does Region 8’s page. Regions 9 and 10 are blank, like Region 1.
We have been complaining about the lack of info since last summer. Note this TSW post comparing access to BLM State leadership vs. a contact form for the FS. A
And here’s a TSW post including Andy Stahl’s letter as well as the last Admin’s response. Andy responded by saying (see comments on that post).
We don’t know why the Forest Service has chosen to cut itself off from the public. I do know that it was the agency’s own choice; not one imposed by USDA. For example, your sister agency, NRCS, has publicly available employee directories, and contact information for its key staff, including chief, readily available on its website.
We look forward to working with the new administration to restore public trust in the Forest Service.
I have to acknowledge that the effort to do the web migration has been a serious problem for FS communications people who have had to redo links, after being told they wouldn’t have to. It’s a problem for the rest of us who use FS sites and don’t like the current layout for NFS. I am going to say upfront that I don’t know that the new Admin is responsible for web migrations- based on the new standard forest format, I’d guess they had a hand in it. It was/is still a cluster, but agencies are perfectly capable of various kinds of clusters on their own.
I just went to the Shasta T. and clicked on their SOPA.. went to click on a project, and the link doesn’t seem to work.
Description: The Northwest Forest Plan Amendment provides an updated management framework that incorporates best available scientific information, considers public input, recommendations from the Federal Advisory Committee, tribes, and government partners.
Web Link: http://www.fs.usda.gov/project/?project=64745
Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t get any of those links to work.
In May, I noticed this and received this back from the webmasters (who always answer, so shout-out to them)
Good morning, we’re in the middle of a web migration so are having some hiccups. The SOPA docs have moved to forest pages.
2. Approps GAO Study and Timeline for Analyzing Fire Service. We can look at this through two perspectives, the political and the policy. What did the House Approps say specifically?
“To ensure these goals are met and that funding is utilized most effectively, prior to the transfer of any resources or authorities, the Committee directs the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct a study regarding the proposed creation of a consolidated Fire Service within DOI that assesses the impacts on reaching proposed timber targets, continued cohesion between wildland fire management and the hazardous fuels reduction program, continued use of the available red card-certified workforce, and how this new consolidated Service differs from the role the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) already plays to coordinate fire response. Additionally, the study should evaluate the extent to which states, localities, and Tribes were consulted regarding plans for the creation of this new Fire Service and consider what impact this transfer may have on these critical stakeholders.
Not later than 180 days following the enactment of this Act, the Committee directs GAO to report its findings to the Committee, including detailed recommendations for improving performance and addressing any identified deficiencies with the proposal. The Committee further directs DOI and the Forest Service to provide a comprehensive response to GAO’s findings and consider these findings when evaluating future actions and resources related to wildland fire management.
The Committee emphasizes that continued support for this initiative is contingent upon demonstrable progress toward meeting these performance benchmarks, with clear, measurable outcomes.”
First, let’s look at politically.. House Approps seem to be saying “we are not convinced.” They’re asking for a report 180 days after the bill is passed… and we don’t know when that will be. They hope to pass a funding bill before October.. suppose it passes in mid-September, and that language is used as is, 180 days is mid-March, then DOI and the FS would have to respond.. with no apparent time limit. If the agencies really want to pursue the idea, it seems like it would make sense for the agencies themselves to work on addressing those concerns, including clarifying what the goals are, how hazardous fuel reduction programs fit including NEPA and timber sale contracts (about that latter of which the House appears to be concerned), and involving stakeholders once they have a clear proposal. The agencies, could do much of this before the bill is finalized. It will be interesting to see what happens. Policy wise, I think the agencies could probably do a better job than GAO, since they have more people who know more about wildfire and about the stakeholders. To those who say they are too busy with wildfires, I’d say that much of it could be done by folks not directly involved and then information added when wildfire folks become more available. Maybe they have started doing this already?
3. What Was the Admin Supposed to Do? Maybe someone has an answer to this.. we know that the FS overhired on soft money (BIL, IRA) and was in the hole. The first solution was to get rid of temps for 2025. It was considered very bad to get rid of the new, sometimes still probationary, people, involuntarily (“the future”). It turns out it was also bad to encourage more experienced folks to leave via VERAs and other mechanisms (voluntary)( for experienced employees). But these seem to be the only mechanisms available to reduce numbers, at least in a timely way. I think that this would be an interesting topic for someone to explore. What I heard was that the prior Admin encouraged the overhiring; or that “not enough people retired according to the model”; or that basically the FS had a hiring “on” switch and couldn’t turn it off. The latter two are of concern, as there’s no reason to think “hiring back to fill the holes” won’t run into the same overshoots. I think there are people out there who know what the story is and I hope someday they tell us.
4. Records of Previous Reorganizations and Where Are Agency Records in General? A retiree happened to come up with more records on Transformation. He asked the FS if they wanted them. He felt it was not legitimate to post draft documents to the public (I have been doing it, and hadn’t considered this before).
The FOIA folks wrote back to him and said:
If the records were not copies of the finalized documents, they should have been destroyed in 2017, at the end of the 10yr retention period. If the records do document the final decisions of the reorganization, they are permanent and should have been retained until 2017, then retired to NARA in 2017. In any case, the Forest Service is compliant in not having these records anymore and they cannot be provided.
I’ve been trying to contact the historian and understand that that position is vacant. When asking, I get no answer back. Hopefully, when the position gets filled, that person will write a piece describing how all this is supposed to work. Right now, I don’t think we know if there was a “final document.” It’s true that no one probably cares about most 10 year old documents, but the FS reorganization efforts are so intermittent.. and I do remember many excellent people doing excellent work, all of whom are no doubt retired.
Currently we have education programs preparing people to work in the woods. Back in the 1940s they had the same kind of problem, and fixed it with… training POWs.
Thanks to the Cowboy State Daily and author Dick Perue for this one.
Worth reading, but this reminded me that some things haven’t changed much in the last 80 years..
Political and Otherwise
“Last week’s issue of the Saratoga Sun related that 150 war prisoners from the camp at Douglas are at work for the R. R. Crow Timber company in Carbon county. Inquiry in Cheyenne revealed that the number of war prisoners to be so “employed” is to be increased to 300.
“What’s funny about that? Nothing at all except that this is an educational project authorized and supervised by the state department of education.
“The educational feature of the project is supposed to derive from the fact that these war prisoners who recently were engaged in the business of shooting down American soldiers in North Africa are being educated in the art of logging—through the beneficence of the state department of education with benefit of a grant from the federal treasury.
“The logs will be ‘processed’ in the sawmills of R. R. Crow company at or near Saratoga.
“(Mr. Crow is a staunch Republican—[and] twice was a candidate for the nomination for the U. S. senate in the Republican primaries).
“And who are the teachers? Well10or 11 of the Crow Lumber company’s employees have been put on the payroll of the department of education. They are the faculty, as it were.
“These loggers turned teachers, however, do not suffer the financial handicaps of school teachers who teach Wyoming youth in Wyoming schools. Not at all.
“These Crow employees who have switched to the department of education payroll are paid $1.50 per hour for a 44-hour week. We can imagine that many Wyoming district school teachers that is fancy wages. And we believe there are members of the University of Wyoming faculty who willing would trade their pay checks for one of the pay checks that will go to the state department of education’s ‘teachers”’ at or near Saratoga.
“This project no doubt is strictly on the up-and-up. But we never heard of the state department of education paying $1.50 an hour for teachers to teach American youth how to chop down a tree or any other kind of a trade. And if the department of education were staffed by Democrats, we can imagine the nasty things the Republicans would be saying about the waste of federal funds in the timber near Saratoga. They will continue to sob about federal expenditures, but they will not mention the steady flow of federal funds through the department of education—as long as that department is staffed by Republicans.
“For this ‘logging school’ near Saratoga is only one of a number of projects engaged in by the department of education which in the eyes of the taxpayers who pay the bill are of questionable value.”
The above photo is from 2007, by R6 State and Private Forestry of western spruce budworm defoliation. It wasn’t identified to location as far as I could see.
This one is on the Deschutes. For those interested, there is an extensive historical record of photos about various spruce budworm projects here. If you worked on any of those projects you might find a photo of yourself!
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I think we’re having a great discussion about the East-Side screens and the 21- inch diameter rule. Here I’d like to throw in an Old Person observation from my time on the Ochoco during the 80’s. It’s an Old Person observation about what seems to have changed and what has not changed in 40 years. I worked for four forests (the Fremont, Winema, Ochoco and Deschutes), but I’ll focus on the Ochoco.
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Historical aside: The Ochoco Supervisor’s Office at the time was a large open, cubicle puzzle space. I sat in the silviculture zone, next to the irrepressible Duane Ecker, the forest silviculturist, Don Wood and our boss, the Timber Staff, Chuck Downen. But thanks to the wonders of the cubicle environment, I often heard conversations of the Law Enforcement Officer (finding that particularly interesting things were said when he lowered his voice.. “the perpetrator…”). We all had Data Generals (DG’s). Unfortunately, but sometimes entertainingly, our Public Affairs Officer, Joe Meade (who was visually impaired), had a DG that read his email out loud .. in a tinny.. monotonous.. slow… voice. Apparently headphones were too technically or financially difficult to procure.
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At the time, people were running Forplan, and somehow we were involved in the tree-growing part. It could have been John Cissel, our Forplan soothsayer or Bill Anthony, his Deschutes counterpart , who told us “Forplan tells us to cut the ponderosa pine and grow grand fir, because they grow faster and ultimately produce more volume.” Or something like that. I know there are folks here who know more about what Forplan was supposed to be doing than I do.
So we silviculture folks explained why we thought that that was not a good idea. White fir/grand fir/ hybrid (WGH) firs aren’t fire resistant. They have a tendency to get spruce budworm, Doug-fir tussock moth, fir engraver, and a variety of root and other diseases.
So flash forward to today.. now “growing faster” is good idea-wise due to carbon.In this story about a study that Anonymous referred to:
“This is why specifically letting large trees grow larger is so important for climate change because it maintains the carbon stores in the trees and accumulates more carbon out of the atmosphere at a very low cost.”
The study highlights the importance of protecting existing large trees and strengthening the 21-inch rule so that additional carbon is accumulated as 21-30″ diameter trees are allowed to continue to grow to their ecological potential.
As a former silviculture worker, this feels pretty much the same as the Forplan idea of 40 years ago. Assume- no fires, bugs, diseases, drought (conceivably made worse by climate change) and the firs will do fine by themselves! No openings for establishment of PP or WL necessary.
But silviculturists, forest pathologists and entomologists, and fuels practitioners are dealing with the same biophysical realities- that trees don’t grow- whether to be cut as in Forplan, or to sequester carbon- if they’re dead and /or burned. It’s interesting to see that the body of resource professionals’ knowledge haven’t changed much over time (the interaction of trees, bugs, diseases and fire), while ideas about what practitioners should be doing from Forplan to carbon..seem to come from, and have the imprimatur of, people (however well-meaning) generally from elsewhere; places, apparently where fire, bugs, diseases and drought are not a big thing.
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If you want to see how much people already knew in 1994, there’s an excellent round-up, at least as far as the Blue Mountains go, by by the Malheur Forest Silviculturist, David C. Powell, in 1994- 30 years ago now. Same old..
White fir, the favorite food of spruce budworm, has flourished in the fir stands that have encroached on ponderosa pine sites over the last 80 years. By controlling natural underburns, land managers were inadvertently swapping ponderosa pines and western larches for white firs and Douglas-firs. (p. 5)
Ponderosa pine depends on fire to clear away accumulations of needles and twigs so its seeds can find moist mineral soil, and to kill encroaching firs that prevent seedlings from getting
the unobstructed sunlight they need.
By controlling natural underburns, land managers allowed fire-resistant pines and larches to be replaced with shade-tolerant, late-successional species. Many of the replacement species are susceptible to the effects of western spruce budworm, Douglas-fir tussock moth, Indian paint fungus, Armillaria root disease, and other insects and pathogens. (p. 19)
And there’s an interesting section on Native American burning practices:
Although some of the underburns were started by lightning storms in mid or late summer (Plummer 1912), many others were ignited by native Americans (Cooper 1961, Johnston 1970, Robbins and Wolf 1994). When analyzing early journals from the western U.S., Gruell (1985) found that over 40 percent of the fires were described as being started by native Americans.
Two major factors led to conversion of pine stands with underburning to laddered stands with shade-tolerant species. One was fire suppression:
Many land managers would agree that wildfire suppression was a policy with good intentions, but it was a policy that failed to consider the ecological implications of a major shift in species composition. White firs and Douglas-firs can get established under ponderosa pines in the absence of underburning, but they may not have enough resiliency to make it over the long run, let alone survive the next drought. This means that many of the mixed-conifer stands that have replaced ponderosa pine are destined to become weak, and weak forests are susceptible to insect and disease outbreaks (Hessburg and others 1994).
By controlling natural underburns, land managers allowed fire-resistant pines and larches to be replaced with shade-tolerant, late-successional species. Many of the replacement species are susceptible to the effects of western spruce budworm, Douglas-fir tussock moth, Indian paint fungus, Armillaria root disease, and other insects and pathogens. (p. 19)
The other reason was the attraction of cutting pine and leaving the GWH firs. Powell provides some detailed explanations of why that seemed like a good idea at the time (mo clearcutting, no expensive tree planting)(p. 27) . And there were interactions between controlling underburns and reducing tree vigor due to competition, so then they would want to take these stressed pines.
Since old pines often have low vigor and little resistance to insect attack, they were harvested before being attacked and killed by western pine beetle or mountain pine beetle. One reason for low vigor in oldgrowth pine trees was competition from a dense understory, an understory that would not have been present if underburning had been allowed to play its natural role.
In 1994 folks were thinking about climate change:
Reestablishing ponderosa pine and western larch on sites that are suitable for their survival and growth, and a thinning or prescribed fire program to keep those stands open and vigorous, would probably do much to address global warming concerns. Using a plan like that one would not only restore much of the pine and larch that was removed by partial cutting (see fig. 21), but it could also create healthy forests with an increased resistance to a variety of insects and pathogens.
And they were also thinking about (healthy=preEuro times) (p. 34)
Perhaps an appropriate yardstick of ecosystem health is natural variation: are the changes caused by budworm consistent with the historical range of variation for similar ecosystems and vegetation conditions? For the mixed conifer forests of the southern Blue Mountains, the answer is probably “no.” It seems that 80 years of fire suppression and 50 years of selective harvesting have resulted in vegetation conditions that differ significantly from those of presettlement times (Table 3).
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If some think that the FS wants to cut larger GWH fir unnecessarily, why would they want to do that?
Foster (1907) White fir, though occasionally used for fuel when no better species are available, makes poor fuel wood, while for saw timber it is all but valueless owing to the fact that nearly all mature trees are badly rotted by a prevalent polyporus, and the wood season-checks badly. (p.30)
Forest Service employees have sometimes been called p— firs due to the “badly rotted” characteristics of white fir.
One of the points I like to make about our forest policy world is that it is a great space for folks raising families and with other commitments. You can take a few years off (or possibly decades) and come back and not really miss much. Thanks to the TSW reader who found this hearing from the year 2000. If you swapped out “Climate Forest Campaign” for “Heritage Forest Campaign” and OG for Roadless, and Biden for Clinton-Gore, and probably increased the budget figures, it sounds like the same thing, and I think the questions asked are still worth pursuing. Sorry about the formatting. This is just Chenoweth-Hage’s introductory statement, I didn’t read the rest, there are 128 pages. Might be other interesting stuff there.
Now, Rep. Chenoweth-Hage was appropriately concerned for rural communities as she represented Idaho. At the same time, today, these policies influence all kinds of communities near Federal lands. Another difference between then and now is our interest in the voices of Tribes, ethnic minorities and the poor and working class- marginalized communities. How are these folks (say folks from poor rural communities) represented on Boards and decision-making in these foundations?
“Theimportantissuehereiswhetherthefoundationstrategiesusedtofundtheenvironmentalmovementarebuyingundueinfluenceforthosegroupsonpubliclandspolicy.” IMHO this question is still valid.
Finally, what is the endgame of these foundations, if they have one? Is it the same old “no oil and gas drilling, no mining, no grazing, no commercial logging, no OHV’s”? I don’t know that we know, nor can I imagine who would have the political power to have that conversation.
Many thanks to John for this link to a Seattle Times story on John Marshall, who is taking photographs from the same areas as the Osborne photos of the 1930s. Very cool photos and it’s not paywalled. If you want to learn more about the Osborne photos, Bob Zybach provided a link to a project trying to provide comparison photos over a broad area. The Osborne photos from some areas you may be familiar with are posted on the site. This seems like a useful effort, and it sounds like lots of different folks are funding different parts. I’m surprised someone with funds doesn’t take this on more broadly and coordinate. Here are some quotes from the story:
His images, taken from the same vantage points nearly a century later, illustrate the consequences of relentless fire suppression. Across the state, Marshall has documented the transformation of landscapes historically characterized by patchworks of saplings, mature trees, shrubs and meadows — all shaped by frequent, small fires. Today, clearings have been swallowed up. Habitat diversity has diminished, and ridges and hillsides are thick with timber. Many forests, especially in Central and Eastern Washington, are stressed by overcrowding, heat, drought and insect infestations — and primed for megafires.
It’s not a new story, but the pictures tell it in a way words can’t.
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Forest Service ecologist Paul Hessburg, who helped recruit Marshall to the panorama project in 2010, has used the before-and-after images in scores of scientific publications and nearly 200 presentations to peers and the public, making the case for allowing some fires to burn and deliberately setting others to reduce the risk of massive blazes.
“These visuals are so powerful because they show the scale,” says Hessburg, who’s based at the Pacific Northwest Research Station in Wenatchee. “People come up to me after talks and say, ‘You know, I wouldn’t have believed it until I saw it — but there it is.’ ”
The panoramas also helped Hessburg bust a long-standing myth that high-elevation forests in the Northwest hadn’t burned frequently in the past. “John and I have been working together in different geographies to show people how, in 100 years or less, the forest has changed,” he says. “And it’s changed more than we could have even imagined until we had these pictures.”
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The agency recently launched a forest health initiative that includes tree-thinning and prescribed burns. “We’ve grown up with these dense, thick forests, so people naturally think that’s what a healthy forest looks like,” says Chuck Hersey, of DNR’s Forest Resilience Division. “But our fundamental forest health problem in Eastern Washington is that there’s too many trees.” Side-by-side images separated by nine decades make the case at a glance, showing the stark changes in the landscape.
One example is Squilchuck State Park near Wenatchee, where fire used to sweep through every dozen years or so before land managers started snuffing out every blaze. A detail shot from the 1934 Osborne panorama shows open meadows interspersed with clumps of mature, fire-resistant Ponderosa pine and sparser stands of firs and other species. In the image Marshall made in 2018, the area is blanketed with wall-to-wall trees. The pictures helped Washington State Parks explain its rationale for two recent thinning operations to lower the fire risk.
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In 1934, several patches across the landscape had recently burned, he explains. Some were ringed with shrubs and deciduous trees. Now, most of those areas are completely knitted in with conifers. But in other places, there seem to be more openings in the tree canopy today than 90 years ago.
“That’s due to insects and disease,” Marshall says. While fires clear out flammable material, infestations don’t. “It only adds to the fuel loads, which are just ginormous now.”
We might want to email the reporter and thank her.. “catch people doing something right”.. maybe FS folks remember the training we had on that..
Last month, I rode the train into Union Station, New Haven, Connecticut for the first time in fifty years. That was 1972, two years after Earth Day, three years after NEPA, and NFMA was not yet a twinkle in the eye of Congress. So let’s just say that much has changed since then. Fifty years before I took the train in 1972 was 1922, right after World War I and before the Dust Bowl, which remains the US’s worst environmental disaster. And fifty years from now will be 2072, which seems like a long ways away. If you think about a fifty-year span of time, you may be able to see patterns- what is a trend and what is a blip
I was in New Haven to receive an award from the Yale School of the Environment Alumni Association. As I told the students, if you work on the same thing for 50 years, chances are, somewhere along the way, someone will appreciate it (even if you have to wait a long time :)) . I was hoping to give a seminar (challenging the Coastal Elite in the hold of their Mothership, what fun!) but post-Covid they decided to move to video. This was a bit challenging for me, as they were looking for video of me doing interesting things, but I was lucky to find black and white photos. Most of my work has been not visually interesting, think Data General or later terminals, or rooms with people and flipcharts- or even piles of paper, or conference calls (pre-Zoom). I spent weeks digging through old files, remembering people, and thinking about my story and all the different ways of telling it. I am very grateful to the talented editor and producer Alana DeJoseph for spinning gold from a mess of straw.
I would never have dug into all this without the prompt from Yale, but it has been a meaningful exercise for me. I reached out in gratitude with many colleagues from the past. And it was interesting to find what bits of history are available on the internet and which are not. The human brain is all about story-telling and sense-making, and what could be more human than telling your own story?
So I’m making a request, for any of you who are so inclined, I’d be interested in posting reflective historic pieces; what did you experience? what did you learn? what is your current perspective on your experiences? what advice would you give to younger folks?
The view east from the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. Park advocates and members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, whose descendants were victims of the 1864 massacre, are concerned that a massive Xcel Energy project could infringe on the “cultural landscape” by placing towers and transmission lines in the viewshed. (Provided by Matt LeBlanc to the Colorado Sun)
The Colorado Sun has a story about wind turbine and power line development near historic sites, including Sand Creek, Camp Amache, and the Minidoka National Historic Site.
This article from Boise State Public Radio is about the Lava Ridge Energy Project which is on BLM land near the Minidoka National Historic Site. Conceivably different DOI agencies should be able to work this out.
This quote is about the Sand Creek Massacre site:
“It isn’t like any other national historic site, probably anywhere, because of the atrocities that went on there,” he said. “So when we as the tribes go back to the site, we’re going back to a place of sorrow, because that time era, and the massacre itself, was basically the beginning of historical trauma for our tribal people.
“When we go back to that site to reflect, to commemorate, to mourn, to try to heal,” he added, “seeing some big power lines there doesn’t help with that, aesthetically.”
The debate over how close is too close reflects a burgeoning issue nationwide as proposed construction of large-scale renewable energy projects like wind and solar arrays, key tools in the fight against climate change, bump sometimes uncomfortably against cultural landmarks.
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And while she acknowledges that the NPS has no control over what happens beyond its borders, she notes that ever since Congress authorized the area as a national historic site in 2000, nothing has interfered with the cultural and educational experience.
“There were periods when it looked like oil and gas development was imminent, and large scale agriculture could make an impact on the viewshed,” Roberts said. “But none of that has happened in all these years.”
The National Parks Conservation Association, a nonprofit that describes its mission as protecting and preserving the nation’s parks, two weeks ago submitted a letter to the Colorado PUC, as well as Xcel’s siting consultant, laying out its concerns about the viewshed and communication with tribal interests. In addition to the Xcel project, the NPCA also is sensitive to potential wind power construction of towering turbines that rise higher than transmission towers, wrote NPCA Colorado senior program director Tracy Coppola.
Some park advocates recommend that transmission line towers — Xcel estimates the single-pole structures rising from 105 to 140 feet, depending on topography — should be at least 12 miles from its boundaries. In calculating that distance, the Sand Creek Massacre Foundation referenced a 2013 National Park Service-commissioned natural resource assessment, then adapted that report’s findings with regard to the viewshed to take into account the height of the towers.
Currently, Xcel said, it is evaluating locations for the new transmission lines 4 to 8 miles from the site’s boundary, but also will consider other options. “And that’s all part of our analysis,” said project manager Heather Brickey. “Our goal is to find the best route that meets the needs of the project and also meets the needs of the community.”
The NPS assessment identifies the cultural landscapes and viewshed as “fundamental resources and values for the site.”
“From a cultural and historical perspective, the views are not just about the scenery, but rather an important way to better understand the massacre at Sand Creek Massacre NHS,” the report said. “Visualizing the massacre as it played out on the landscape is a critical part of the visitor experience.”
Image courtesy of Laurie Gwen Shapiro by way of The Forward. Top of the World: Morrison circa 1943. He received a Bronze Star for his service in World War II.
I’ve visited Camp Hale on field trips with the Forest Service. Right now, I believe something about preserving/interpreting Camp Hale is in the CORE Act. I ran across this piece this morning telling the history of one soldier in the 10th Mountain Division, Sam Meiselman (Morrison), in the Forward.
I first went back with other veterans in 1988 to the battlefields, and that helped bring inner peace, too. I’ve gone many times since, but that first trip brought back memories, good and scary. To this day there are foxholes covered over by grass; you have to be careful. I took 35 rolls of film, many pictures of the villagers who remembered us. So many of those people are dead now.
We fellows closed up the war. The 10th is a great outfit, and we showed the way. Bob Dole, and all the rest of us, we didn’t want this country to get caught short again without special forces. And because of what the Germans had mountainwise, we smartened up America.
I enjoyed reliving the past, but I looked to the future. I was not just active in the 10th Mountain. I’ve also been connected to the International Federation of Mountain Soldiers, where people in mountain divisions of all countries reunite. We remember those lost, and we tell our stories and the stories of those who did not make it back. We have our own pin, and we’ve created peace trails. Ours is in Colorado. I’ve walked that with former Nazis. A German soldier is a member — we are all close-knit brothers now for the love of the mountains — and the love of peace. I know we were called the “Greatest Generation,” but I am well aware we are among the disappearing generation. The old story is, it takes three to take a mountain: one to get killed, one to get wounded and one to tell the story. I got two out of three. So I didn’t do bad.
The whole story is interesting and I believe the Forward allows a number of free articles.
Campers in what was the Davenport group in the mountains west of Pueblo (CO). The FS’s Davenport Campground remains west of what was considered the Agency’s first camp, envisioned between 1919 and 1920. Photo courtesy of the Forest Service.
Here’s an interview with Ralph Swain, long-term Forest Service regional recreation specialist in the Colorado Springs Gazette.
And Swain can’t help but laugh now. Because of how obvious the answer became, yes. But also because he now knows there was a lesson from 100 years ago.
In 1920, Coloradans were still dying, though less frequently, from the flu that had taken the country by storm two years prior. Also in 1920, there was a young man by the name of Arthur Carhart who was in the final stages of developing a recreation site intended to meet the demands of new outdoor masses.
In the San Isabel National Forest west of Pueblo, there was to be a “health” camp, as Carhart tended to call it.
It would become an inspiration for Forest Service campgrounds everywhere.
This has been a recent point of research for Swain, a passionate, amateur historian. Carhart “would’ve anticipated it,” Swain says of today’s crowding in the woods. “He would’ve said, ‘Oh yeah, they’re gonna come, and they’re gonna come in droves.’”
As they had been from Pueblo during World War I, escaping the heat and troubles of civilization for the cool, refreshing wilds of the Wet Mountains.
It was a troubling time indeed. In 1914, before men left for the conflict in Europe, before they contracted the fast-spreading sickness in the trenches, they were reeling from labor wars close to home. Miners, women and children died in the Ludlow Massacre, the fallout of which reached a short distance north to John D. Rockefeller’s steel empire in Pueblo.
“As a result,” reads a paper prepared by and for the Forest Service, “the local community sought increased and safe access to the newly discovered benefits of hunting, fishing, and family gatherings on public lands.”
This, researchers have noted, was all part of demands for more leisure and higher pay and the kinds of safer, 40-hour workweeks that were being negotiated in cities nationwide, not just in Colorado’s second-largest metro, as Pueblo was then.
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The Squirrel Creek concept included brief pull-offs for cars to reach “private” sites, along with picnic tables, water pumps, trash receptacles, fire grates and latrines.
“This new idea called ‘camping’ took off,” the Forest Service later recounted.
Squirrel Creek Canyon was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. Though much was destroyed in a 1947 flood, remains of the old campground can still be found along the Squirrel Creek Canyon Trail, west of Pueblo Mountain Park and east of Davenport Campground. The canyon is about 5 miles north of Lake Isabel, the destination that Carhart also envisioned.
Largely lost around that old campground is a trail from Carhart’s day. Wingate hopes to revive it in the next couple of years, pending funds. “As a remembrance of what it was like,” he says.
