Forest Carnage

You've seen many of the great scenic places I have been in my life. However, I have also seen a lot of "environmental ugliness" in my career. I'm currently on a mission to convince people that "letting nature take its course" is definitely NOT the thing to do, in this day and age. Posting pictures here means they will be available to me to post in eco-forums. A picture is worth a thousand words and, since I was once a "Freddie", my words are automatically tainted. Soooo, I think that posting pictures of the mess our forests are in will go a long way towards convincing people that our forests DO need human intervention and that they are NOT "doing just fine for the last 10,000 years without humans".

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Here is a picture of the Lake Tahoe area behind Kings Beach, during the early 90's drought and bark beetle emergency. Environmentalists and misguided people stopped much of the salvage efforts and most of the dead trees you see in this picture have fallen over and lie in wait for the next inevitable lightning fire. In this dry summer environment, wood simply doesn't decay into soil. It BURNS!

Eco's always try to say that wildfires are "beneficial" and "low-intensity". This shot of Oregon's Biscuit Fire shows, without a doubt, that fires indeed cause forest destruction and very longterm damage. Even with a minimum of ground cover, due to rocky terrain, the fire burned with such intensity that it killed almost every single tree.

Here is another picture in the same area of the Biscuit Fire. For as far as you can see in the distance, the fire killed trees and burned up spotted owl nesting sites, and habitat. The areas that weren't salvaged, due to them being within Spotted Owl "circles", are now doomed to burn again, causing hellish fire intensities near the ground and sterilizing soils for decades into the future. They will no longer be able to support the large trees that were once there.

Here is a dramatic picture of a burn area in the Bitterroot National Forest, where mortality looks to be about 90%. The wood became unusable due to litigation against the Forest Service and now, this area is also doomed to burn again, at high intensity. The original fire is clearly NOT "beneficial", and the land will suffer for decades.

Here is an example of a "biological wildfire", where bark beetles have overwhelmed every single pine in the area of Camp Seeley, near Crestline, in the San Bernardino National Forest. A lack of scientific forest management allowed this forest to become overstocked with trees, causing it to be ultra-sensitive to even minimal drought. As the drought worsened, the entire forest became completely stressed and the bark beetles "bloomed" into an unstoppable force and the forests had no defense against them.