Editor's Column
Posted: 2011-12-13
Posted: 2011-05-26
We have been deluged by responses to Barry Wynsma's thoughtful essay on Forest Service leadership - or the lack thereof. Provided here is some feedback on the essay.
Posted: 2011-05-17
View Editor's Column Archive
W.V. "Mac" McConnell writes from Florida. He is a U.S. Forest Service retiree whose Power Point presentations have appeared on our website many times. His latest efforts are nearby: an updated version of his earlier "Timber Resource Management" Power Point and a fascinating photograph, "One Landscape: Four Views," that shows what is happening on adjacent public and private forests at Deep Creek, near Townsend, Montana.
Guest Columns
Posted: 2012-02-02
Posted: 2012-01-09
Editor's comment concerning Mike Petersen's (Executive Director - Lands Council) Response To Dr. Tom Bonnicksen's Essay, "Death Of A Forest: Why We Should Care"
Posted: 2012-01-08
View Guest Columns Archive
Woods Wisdom
No visit to Yellowstone would be complete without visiting - and photographing - Old Faithful, so named because it erupts every 40-100 minutes, shooting an impressive stream of 199-degree water from 110 to 185 feet into the air. Yellowstone sits in a vast thermal basin and has hundreds of spectacular geysers and mud pots.
Forest management is not permitted in U.S. national parks. This allows scientists and park visitors to view nature "in the raw." This 20-year-old lodge pine pole thicket is a byproduct of natural regeneration that followed the 1988 Yellowstone Fires. It is so dense it cannot be penetrated by man nor beast. In time, it may prune itself, if it does not reburn first, but after 20 years, these trees are only about seven feet tall. Were it possible to thin the stand, the residual trees would grow much larger, but such forms of management are illegal in national parks.
Next to Niagara, no waterfall in America has been photographed more than Lower Yellowstone Falls, near Canyon Village in Yellowstone National Park. The 308-foot tall waterfall crashes over a 590,000-year-old Rhyolite lava flow on its descent into the 1,100-foot deep Yellowstone Canyon. Once out of the canyon, the Yellowstone River becomes one of the finest trout rivers in the western United States.
Where sufficient soil remained after the 1988 Yellowstone Fire, lodgepole recovery is impressive. Lodgepole quickly reseeds itself following fire, a result of the fact that its seed cones are opened by heat.
The National Park Service has done a good job of placing interpretative signs along Yellowstone's main thoroughfares. Even so, many visitors express great surprise on learning that the Park Service did not harvest any of the timber killed in the 1988 fire, nor was any effort made to replant what was destroyed. What you see today is entirely the work of nature.
"We must always consider the environment and people together, as though they are one, because the
human need to use natural resources is fundamental to our continued presence on earth."
P.O. Box 1290, Bigfork, MT. 59911 • Tel: (406) 837-0966 • Fax: (406) 258-0815 • Email:
human need to use natural resources is fundamental to our continued presence on earth."