The U.S. Forest Service in Washington D.C. changed its national policy on the price of selling Forest Service timber in a way they hope will help forestry projects clear cut timber off of its thinning areas.
Across the country, Forest Service officials are now able to sell bundles of logs for a new minimum price that applies to trees regardless of its diameter — 25 cents per CCF. As 5 CCFs can fill a log truck, the new metric means a truck could be carrying a load worth only about $1.25 in areas with low-value lumber. John Crockett, Deputy Director of Forest Management, Range Management and Ecology at the Forest Service in Washington D.C., expects the change will not impact areas where trees are sold at high value, and will only help areas that are struggling to remove unhealthy swaths of trees.
The Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) works across four national forests and offers timber sales and stewardship contracts to clear unhealthy forests around northern Arizona. The new minimum rate will help 4FRI lower the cost of the wood, in the hopes that a business might be able to save money on the wood and afford the costs of removing it from the site.
This is where the world could support new forests. The map excludes existing forests, urban areas, and agricultural lands. J. BASTIN, ET. AL., SCIENCE 365, 76, 2019
There was a new article in Science that caused a kerfuffle in the Twitterverse (is that a Twitterfuffle?), which may be of interest to us. The story is that Science published an article saying that “planting trees globally would be REALLY good for carbon”. Now you may say that that’s not really news, but the authors made lots of assumptions (!) and ran models (!) and came up with some big numbers (!) and made perhaps out-sized claims. What is of interest to me is the choice of scale, in this case, the world. It takes chutzpah, I think, to think you can model how people could plant trees all around the world, where, and what that would do for carbon, get meaningful results and not need to ground-truth your work.
As you all know, I am a proponent of planting trees. I especially think that planting trees post-fire (where natural regeneration isn’t working), is something most people would support, not just for carbon reasons. I had heard at one time that the Forest Service was going to make a major push on its reforestation backlog, but never heard what happened to that effort. Anyone reading from the FS, please let us know! Anyway, here’s the free info on the paper and a link:. There’s also a science op-ed that has a firewall here.
The restoration of forested land at a global scale could help capture atmospheric carbon and mitigate climate change. Bastin et al. used direct measurements of forest cover to generate a model of forest restoration potential across the globe (see the Perspective by Chazdon and Brancalion). Their spatially explicit maps show how much additional tree cover could exist outside of existing forests and agricultural and urban land. Ecosystems could support an additional 0.9 billion hectares of continuous forest. This would represent a greater than 25% increase in forested area, including more than 500 billion trees and more than 200 gigatonnes of additional carbon at maturity. Such a change has the potential to cut the atmospheric carbon pool by about 25%.
Abstract
The restoration of trees remains among the most effective strategies for climate change mitigation. We mapped the global potential tree coverage to show that 4.4 billion hectares of canopy cover could exist under the current climate. Excluding existing trees and agricultural and urban areas, we found that there is room for an extra 0.9 billion hectares of canopy cover, which could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon in areas that would naturally support woodlands and forests. This highlights global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date. However, climate change will alter this potential tree coverage. We estimate that if we cannot deviate from the current trajectory, the global potential canopy cover may shrink by ~223 million hectares by 2050, with the vast majority of losses occurring in the tropics. Our results highlight the opportunity of climate change mitigation through global tree restoration but also the urgent need for action.
I don’t know how anyone could model “forest loss due to climate change” since we don’t know how the climate will change, nor how trees will respond.
There is an interesting twitter discussion started by (Dr.) Pep Canadell linked here.
Replying to @pepcanadell
Some concerns on methods: only 10-13 factors determine tree cover potential globally – major local and regional-scale constraints missing, e.g. permafrost, subsoil constraints (ex. depth to bedrock), nutrient limitations, var. forms of soil degradation, seasonal inundation.
Replying to @EikeLuedeling @pepcanadell
Very relevant in high-potential areas! They also assume grazing areas and production forests can reach same tree cover as protected areas. In my view, a gross overestimate of actual potential! And a lesson on how machine-learning algorithms still need a reality check.
So I’m not the only person out there concerned about reality checks.
If you have been around the research business long enough, you have seen many research topics, administrative inclinations, and locations come and go. In the early 80’s, I worked for the National Forests in central Oregon.
Most of the research was done, and most of the scientists located, on the wet West Side (WWS) of Oregon. It made sense at the time, as those folks, private and public, were engaged in intensive timber management and wanted to know how to do it right. In addition, the land grant university with responsibility for agriculture and forestry (OSU) was in Corvallis. But that left us with a relative handful of scientists and projects everywhere from Bend to Lakeview to Pendleton. Now, OSU didn’t have an SRUS (a science regional utility standard) that required their research portfolio to be relevant to all parts of the state equally. The east side was a kind of scientific stepchild. At least SW Oregon had the FIR Program, which turned out much helpful information to practitioners in SW Oregon.
I’ll tell a couple of stories about “West-side-itis”. At one time, the Ochoco, Winema, Fremont and Deschutes silviculture folks had a training session with (Drs.) Chad Oliver and Bruce Larsen for a few days at Pringle Falls. I think both may have been at UW (Seattle) at the time. They were both fantastic teachers, especially as a duo. Bruce was rapid-fire, and Chad laid back and Southern, so it made long sessions entertaining as well as informative. They were talking about trees competing for light, and someone asked “how do the models handle it if it is competition for water, not light?” It took a while for them to answer, because in their WWS world, it wasn’t really an important question. I hope you can see my point. If people tend to study and understand what’s around them, in Oregon, the scientific topo lines would have been highest in Corvallis (note that the FS had a big lab there, which made sense, so they could interact with OSU, EPA and other scientists) and gone to zero somewhere between Klamath Falls and Hart Mountain.
One more story. In the early 80’s, an OSU economics prof came out to talk to us, and we met with the Weyerhaeuser folks who also had land in our area. The OSU fellow said that to use the latest science we needed to increase the size of our clearcuts to be more like the Weyco folks. This was, of course, long before (Dr.) Jerry Franklin came up with “big messy clearcuts” so there were the clearcuts that people didn’t like that were then made smaller, but then Jerry thought that big messy ones were better. If we didn’t do it, of course, we weren’t using “the latest science.” Which had been inspired, planned, designed, carried out, and analyzed without our input, and without consideration of (major) differences in the environment. But if you work in an area that folks don’t come out and study, doing things that science funders don’t find to be interesting, can you then be criticized for not having scientific evidence for what you’re doing? Well.. yes.
Of course, research managers have been challenged by declining budgets. But when you think of the closure of the Bend Silviculture Lab or the Macon Fire Sciences Lab, a person has to wonder what geographical diversity and knowledge was lost. Diversity is a good thing, right? At least today, that’s a value. Back in those days, you needed a building, and upkeep, and computer and staff support to have people somewhere. Maybe, especially in today’s virtual society, there’s an argument for locating federal researchers far away from universities and closer to the people working directly with the creatures, people, plants and landscapes or situations they study. Not the least advantage, in my mind, would be to interact more with their practitioner colleagues, and develop a better understanding of what they do and why they do it.
The government is asking the Supreme Court to review the appeals court decision that the Forest Service may not grant a right-of-way across the Appalachian Trail for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. More on this and on the Mountain Valley Pipeline here.
The Notice of Intent to Sue under the Endangered Species Act involves the Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service, and concerns the effects on wolverines of the North Bridger Forest Health Project on the Custer Gallatin Forest.
Title of a paper ($) in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, “Is fire “for the birds”? How two rare species influence fire management across the US,” by 17 authors including noted fire ecologist Scott L. Stephens (professor at UC Berkeley) and Thomas A. Spies (key owl researcher at the Pacific Northwest Research Station). UC Berkeley press release:
Spotted owl populations are in decline all along the West Coast, and as climate change increases the risk of large and destructive wildfires in the region, these iconic animals face the real threat of losing even more of their forest habitat.
Rather than attempting to preserve the owl’s remaining habitat exactly as is, wildfire management — through prescribed burning and restoration thinning — could help save the species, argues a new paper by fire ecologists and wildlife biologists and appearing today (July 2 ) in the journal, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
The paper compares the plight of the owl with that of another iconic threatened species, the red-cockaded woodpecker, which has made significant comebacks in recent years — thanks, in part, to active forest management in the southern pine forests that the woodpecker calls home. Though the habitat needs of the two birds are different, both occupy forests that once harbored frequent blazes before fire suppression became the norm.
“In the South, the Endangered Species Act has been used as a vehicle to empower forest restoration through prescribed burning and restoration thinning, and the outcome for the red-cockaded woodpecker has been positive and enduring,” said Scott Stephens, a professor of environmental science, policy and management at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author on the study.
“In the West, it’s just totally the opposite,” Stephens added. “Even though both places physically have strong connections to frequent fire, the feeling here is that the best thing to do is to try to protect what we have and not allow the return of frequent fire — but that’s really difficult when you have unbridled fires just ripping through the landscape.”
…
However, suppressing all fires in order to encourage growth of these dense canopies also creates conditions that are ripe for large, severe wildfires that can take out not just the smaller trees, but entire forests, obliterating swaths of owl habitat in the process. The 2014 King Fire, for example, tore through regions of the Eldorado National Forest that were home to a long-term study of the California spotted owl and caused the bird’s largest population decline in the 23-year history of the study.
“A key question to be asking is: Where would owl habitats be with more characteristic fire regimes, and could we tailor landscape conditions where these habitats are less vulnerable and more supportive of today’s wildfires?” said co-author Paul Hessburg, a research landscape ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station.
The solution would mean, “essentially creating less habitat in order to have more in the long run,” he said.
From this presentation by Mike Fettic https://www.nifc.gov/fireandsagegrouse/ppt/Fettic.pdfIt appears from this Bloomberg story that BLM would like to implement fuel breaks along roads in Nevada and Utah, and is using large-scale NEPA. The poor BLM- they try to be efficient NEPA-wise and all they get is grief. But what was most curious to me was the way the scientific side was covered in the article. Apologies for the length of this post but I thought the quotes from the different scientists were interesting.
The USGS report calls new fuel breaks “a grand experiment” and says that there is very little scientific evidence—only anecdotal evidence—that they work.
It took me about two seconds to find this one.
Perhaps the report authors looked at it and decided observations of practitioners don’t count, even if summarized in a report. It’s pretty compelling to me, though. In fact, I would believe interviews with fire people more than calculations on data sets published in a journal. Here’s what the fire folks quoted say:
“The main theme fire managers expressed regarding fuel breaks is that they are not show stoppers. “You still have to show up to the fire,” said Lance Okeson, Boise District BLM Fuels AFMO. Fuel breaks are designed to work in conjunction with fire resources (e.g., engines, water tankers, etc.) to stop fires. In most situations fuel breaks alone will only reduce the rate of spread and intensity of a wildfire. It won’t put it
out, but it can greatly increase the chances of containing a fire and can dramatically reduce the size and severity of wildfires. Managers agreed that fuel breaks will not slow down head fires under extreme conditions, but will dramatically reduce the spread rate of a flaming front under normal conditions.
Back to the USGS report:
Firefighters recognize that fuel breaks are likely to do little to reduce a fire’s intensity, flame length or rate of spread under the extreme fire weather conditions that have caused wildfires to explode and quickly spread through the Great Basin in recent years, the report says.
“That is a limitation of fuel breaks—under severe fire weather conditions they’re not going to be effective because the intensity of those fires is such that they can jump right across fuel breaks and roads,” Douglas J. Shinneman, a USGS supervisory research fire ecologist in Idaho and lead author of the report, said in an interview.
It seems like that quote is a bit misleading in that it doesn’t mention the utility of fuelbreaks in helping with suppression. Which is exactly the main point, as the fire folks say in their report. Then we get to the old “it won’t work all the time, so we shouldn’t do it” argument.
The breaks could slow wildfire spread and are a logical idea given the increased wildfire threat, but they’d have to be regularly maintained, said J. Derek Scasta, an assistant professor and extension rangeland specialist in the Ecosystem Science and Management department at the University of Wyoming.
“It’s easy to create an overly ambitious plan that the human resources aren’t there to do it the way it should be done or the way we want them to be done,” he said. “There are big questions with fuel breaks, too. At this landscape-scale, how do we establish fuel breaks that are long enough, wide enough, enough in number to actually affect fires?”
If fuel breaks are ever proved effective against wildfire, they come with a tradeoff: Damaged habitat for species such as the greater sage grouse, Shinneman of the USGS said. The chicken-sized bird is an indicator species for the health of the sagebrush lands, which support hundreds of species of wildlife, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
In building fuel breaks, “ideally we will reduce wildfire, or at least the risk of wildfire, but at the same time, there’s going to be potentially negative impacts from additional disturbance of the fuel breaks themselves, and it can be argued that that’s the lesser of the two evils,” Shinneman said.
The BLM considers the area where the fuel breaks may be built already disturbed because they’ll parallel existing roads or other rights of way, said Ken Frederick, a spokesman for the BLM’s National Interagency Fire Center.
This includes the “they won’t work if we can’t afford to keep them up” argument (but it also raises the question of whether they can afford to do them in the first place). Also the “they work but not at the landscape scale” this is confusing, I’d have asked Scasta more about that.
‘Conveyor Belt’ For Fire
The fuel breaks promote the spread of invasive grasses and other non-native species, which can take over large swaths of land and increase the risk that wildfires will spread, not slow down when hit the fuel breaks, said Meg Krawchuk, a scientist who studies landscape fire and conservation science at Oregon State University.
“They carry fire very fast, very quickly,” Krawchuk said, referring to fuel breaks covered with invasive plant species. “You end up with a conveyor belt for fire in these grasses.”
Fuel breaks also fragment wildlife habitat and damage ecosystems—especially from the use of chemicals and earth-moving machines the BLM expects to use to clear the fuel breaks, said Erica Newman, a researcher studying the ecological effects of wildfire and other landscape disturbances at the University of Arizona.
“One of the big rules of ecology that we know is that species do not survive in fragmented habitat,” Newman said. “They’re talking about an ineffective tool to fight fire, and it’s going to fragment habitat. They’re going to raise fire risk and further endanger biodiversity. Their reason for doing this is not sound.”
“I have never heard any scientific basis for fuel breaks,” Newman said. “They’re obscuring science rather than employing it to do their research. This looks like a giveaway to the chemical and machinery corporations.”
My bold. That’s a pretty strong statement as quoted.. not for any fuel breaks anywhere ever? And those fire folks who authored the piece above have ulterior motives? Note the presentation by Fettic linked under the photo, he seems to be aware of sage grouse and their habitat.
Colorado Avalanche Deaths By Year 1951 to 2016In Jon’s post on grizzlies and recreation, there was a link to Forest Supervisor Chip Weber’s (I thought) thoughtful piece on recreation and risk and the role of the Forest Service. Of course it was in the context of the grizzly bear issue, but I thought it was worth relating it to the kind of recreation risks people have in other places. Frankly, I also liked the idea of a Forest Supervisor opening a discussion and telling us what he thinks.
How does the risk you are exposed to in these activities compare to other recreational activities that occur on the national forests?
What about rafting, boating, swimming, or fishing? Each of these activities has broad acceptance to occur on national forests, often in very wild and remote settings. From 2005-2014, there were an average of 3,536 fatal accidental drownings (non-boating related) annually in the
United States — about ten deaths per day. An additional 332 people died each year from drowning in boating-related incidents. We do many things to try to promote water safety, but we don’t tell folks to stay away from the water.
Non-Montana perspective: This year there were six avalanche deaths in two months in Colorado. See here. And six so far this year on rivers, see Westword article here.
In “How to Survive (and Enjoy) Potentially Dangerous Rafting Season,” Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s Jason Clay underscored the risks involved in recreating on the state’s rivers amid runoff from a snowpack more than 600 percent above the median. That story was published early June 20.
By the end of the next day, three more people had died in separate river accidents. And now, the body of Colorado Springs’s Roberta Sophia Rodriguez, who fell into the Rio Grande River earlier this month, has been recovered, bringing the fatality total for the season to six.
Back to Weber’s piece:
So why such a different reaction to the much lower risks from wildlife encounters? These are low probability, high consequence events. Deaths from grizzly attacks are horrific. We have a visceral response to that imagery that makes the probability of it happening seem much higher than it is. Activities like driving account for many more deaths, still, driving for pleasure is the number one recreational activity in the country. We normalize risks from these activities because accidents and deaths occur so much more frequently. For a more familiar example, people feel safer driving (fairly high risk) than flying (very low risk).
I would suggest that we consider these different activities on an equal basis in the context of their relative risks when promoting recreation on national forests and other wildlands. All of that said, I think this conversation needs to address an entirely different aspect of risk, namely, who gets to decide what risks anyone takes in their recreational pursuits. I like to make those choices for myself and I want you to be able to do so as well.
Thrill seekers enjoy activities like whitewater rafting and kayaking, rock climbing, hang gliding, downhill and backcountry skiing, and riding challenging trails. The joy of these experiences provides great quality of life for both locals and visitors. The economic benefits from this are
expressed directly in local communities and indirectly by making this a desirable place to live. How will we, as a society, decide these questions? Do we want our decisions to reflect a narrow range of values, where only a certain, few, “approved” uses of public lands may occur? As bears
expand their territories, do we want to increasingly put more and more public lands off limits to recreation that comes with risks? We have a forest plan that seeks to provide the “greatest good for the greatest number”, valuing all of these uses and providing places for awesome frontcountry uses like biking and running as well as amazing, quiet and solitude in world class wilderness. I hope we will continue to value it all.
When I think of the array of avalanches, mountain lion, grizzlies, rafting and so on, I think of two other questions that perhaps Weber did not call out.
1. Before we keep people out, have we exhausted our technological safety possibilities?
2. To what extent is it even possible to keep people out? Of course, you can not permit group or commercial activities. But in many cases, that would not keep people out. It is possible that people (say rafters with commercial permits) are much safer than non-commercial people with boats.
Again, I think it’s a good thing that Weber put all this on the table.
For a long time, the best available science has shown that the worst thing for grizzly bears is to mix them with people. That has led the Forest Service to restrict access and otherwise manage human activities in grizzly bear habitat. Now the Flathead has decided that it is more important to get people into grizzly bear habitat, and it is issuing special use permits for long-distance running races and mountain biking shuttles.
Here’s the forest supervisor’s rationale:
“There’s a broad public out there with needs to be served and not just the needs of the few,” Weber said. “We think that greater good for the greatest number will be served. That fosters connectivity with wildlands and a united group of people that can support conservation. And the best conservation for bears is served by figuring out how to have these human activities in ways that are as safe as they can be, understanding you can never make anything perfectly safe.”
Here’s the opposing argument:
“Weber has set up a straw man here, as though this debate is about ending mountain biking or trail running on public lands,” Hammer said. “What it’s about is educating the public to act responsibly if they choose to engage in those activities. It’s not about letting the public do these activities if that’s what their choice is. It’s about sending the wrong message through special-use permits for risky behavior and the government endorses it.”
“It increases risk that results in bad public attitudes toward bears and increases risk of injury or death to people and bears,” Hammer said. “That’s not conservation. People are free to ignore the advice, but they shouldn’t be getting a special-use permit from the Forest Service that allows them to make money running 200 or 300 people through bear habitat, and using that commercial promotion to imply that’s safe and appropriate activity in bear habitat when the experts, including the supervisor’s own staff, have said this is not responsible behavior.”
A key question here seems to be whether a special use permit is viewed as an “endorsement.” In any case, this is the kind of hard decision forest supervisors get paid the big bucks for. It’s unfortunate that this one misinterprets the opposition as being about “the needs of the few” (and also about “a narrowly focused, discriminatory and exclusionary agenda lacking in intellectual and philosophical integrity”). This is actually about his duty under the Endangered Species Act to “carry out programs for the conservation of” listed species like grizzly bears, which according to Congress are of great value “to the Nation and its people.” With his anti-bear bias, he is starting in the wrong place to make a well-reasoned decision.
(I like the above video, which is shown on ferries to Washington islands, as it includes both safety and “leave no trace” ideas, and reasons for all the rules)
Thanks to Brian Hawthorne for finding this piece from the Seattle Times.
Lots of info and ideas for fixes in this article, e.g. info on trasher shaming on public media. Here’s how it begins:
Here’s a “wow” statistic from the U.S. Forest Service: In 2018, wilderness rangers buried more than 400 piles of human waste found scattered throughout the Enchantments near Leavenworth, which, minus the poo, is one of the loveliest wilderness destinations in all of Washington.
A bonus “wow”: The Enchantments camping zone, because of its immense popularity, is equipped with nine privies, all intended to make improper plopping avoidable. Nevertheless, on more than 400 occasions last year, according to a Forest Service spokesperson, visitors decided to plop with impunity and just walk away.
What is going on?
“It’s unbelievable how much surface pooping is going on out there,” said Craig Romano, a year-round hiker and author of 20 hiking guides for The Mountaineers Books. “I’m coming across it in places I never expected, even remote areas. I find it in the middle of a trail. And toilet paper. Streams of it! What I’m seeing is incredible. It’s absolutely disgusting.”
.. and then on to the end.
Perhaps most vital to the cause: Lots of volunteers who keep visitors in line.
“What’s really unique is there are so many folks out here who are incredibly passionate about this landscape and protecting these lands,” Teague said. “There’s a lot of eyes and ears on the land right now. They’re doing their best to engage with folks and share what’s appropriate and what’s the best outcome for the land. We have a whole bunch of people willing to be out there in force.”
Marcia deChadenedes, manager of San Juan Islands National Monument, says a group of roughly 30 volunteers have kept an eye on Lopez Island for almost three decades.
“They thank people for having their dogs on a leash, or if the dog does not have one, they will hand the owner a leash they brought with them,” she said. “The American public is much in debt to the locals of the San Juan Islands for how well these lands are managed, because these people put all kinds of energy into it.”
How do volunteers deal with contentious visitors? Use an earthy answer to turn away wrath, Teague says.
“Leave No Trace has done a really good job of figuring this out,” Teague said. “We focus on the authority of the resource and what’s happening to the resource due to visitor behavior. We can talk about songbirds that nest close to the trail and how their patterns might be affected if people or their dogs go off trail. It’s not really about the rules, it’s about how they’re affecting the resource.
“It’s a really good technique,” Teague said. “It doesn’t work in every scenario, but it has a lot of power. It’s definitely an art in applying that on the ground in real time. We have a lot of success by smiling and sharing information.”
Watts likewise believes a considerate approach is better than a combative one. “What we’ve found is, if we can have meaningful interactions with people and provide that ‘why’ — why we’re asking them to follow these principles and guidelines — that really makes a difference when it comes to altering behavior and swaying people to protect the land,” she said.
I think that maybe the presence of obvious volunteers has some kind of psychological legitimacy just short of actual law enforcement visibility. Also the fairness concept might creep in (as in why should I keep my dog on leash when no one else does?). The whole question of “the best way to keep people in the backcountry from doing bad things) sounds like a great place for social science research. If anyone has any cites, please put in the comments below.
Greenwire’s article today, “Will more cell towers fuel a ‘nature deficit’?” reminds me of my recent visit to the Mount St. Helens National Monument in Washington (managed by the Gifford Pinchot NF). At the Windy Ridge viewpoint, I walked to the end of the viewing deck with fewer people — just two. Turned out that both of them were talking on their cell phones; one of them was sheltering from the wind and drizzle under the roof over an interpretive kiosk, and the roof acted like a megaphone. I soon departed for other, quieter viewpoints and the USFS campground outside the monument, which had no cell service.
The article reports that National Parks are adding cell infrastructure.
And at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, in perhaps the biggest digital expansion of all, park officials ignited a controversy with their plan to install new towers at nine sites, along with 62 miles of high-speed fiber-optic cable, near the park’s main roads.
With no nationwide policy to guide them, officials at the National Park Service’s 419 sites are finding all sorts of ways to increase their digital connections, hoping to lure more younger visitors. Supporters say it boosts safety and interest in visiting parks.
But critics say it’s a big mistake and actually ensures that children will feel more disconnected from nature in the long run.
“People should have a right to a no-Wi-Fi zone — there should be places where we’re not in contact and reachable,” said Richard Louv, a California author of “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.”
Louv acknowledged that he appears to be on the losing end of the argument with park officials, but he said people should be taught “that connecting to other life is more important than collecting your email.”
I was somewhat encouraged by the family camping a few sites from mine. They apparently weren’t using any electronic devices — they spent most of their time fishing and hanging out by the fire, and the 3 kids spent a lot of time running around with their dog and playing in the woods. If there had been cell service, those folks might have been disconnected from nature much of the time.
