Forestation

A deer antler shed is a rare find.  Here,
I'm demonstrating proper celebration.

When you live in the middle of the wilderness, the opportunity to venture deeper into the woods meets you every day.  Mountains tower above you or line the horizon upon leaving your driveway, rising around every turn and outside every door.  Tree-lined roads beckon you to turn down them, gravel roads await your dusting, and paths encourage you to stop the car, get out, and explore them. Recently, the opportunity arose to get paid to venture deep, very deep, into them thar woods.  Add one awesome Super Duty Ford and a smattering of young adults, and you get Youth Conservation Corps Summer 2013, of which I was the fortunate leader.

It all began on June 10 when five high schoolers - one recent midwest grad, 3 locals, and half a pair of twins - met in a small white room in the back of Murphy Lake Ranger Station in Fortine, Montana.  And there they waited, for an hour, until their leader waltzed into the room late, ill-prepared in short pants and a shirt with short sleeves, and fairly bewildered by everyone's amazing earliness on this first day.  My supervisor met me, briefed me on my first-day errors as he handed me some pants, introduced me to the crew, then to our white Super Duty truck, and finally told us all to get in and get down the road to spend the day mucking the ice-blue water's edge of nearby Dickey Lake.  Since then, we six have met in this small white room four days every week at 7am (maybe 7:05) to await instructions for the next 10 hours of our lives together.  But we always know where every day will start... Da Rig.

Good ol' FS 5868, aka Super Dooty

Our Super Duty truck has become our daily rig into whose bed we toss toilet paper, rakes, pruners, shovels, garbage bags, sand, igloo coolers, red and green backpacks, bamboo, trash, and a mysterious biodegradable mesh whose nasty name will be mentioned in the next paragraph, and into whose twin cab we sardine one coffee-breathed leader and five teenagers with their mp3 players, all on a journey that only the two boys know anything about since they always have been where we are going.  Frank's Lake?  Or just Frank Lake?  Barnaby.  Bluebird.  Chain of Lakes.  Graves Crick (not Creek).  Weasel?  Big T and Lil' T?  Wolverine. Up Beaver, on the way through Ant Flat.  That one place with the amazing elk hunting.  That road off that other road. "That lake we went to that one time when you almost crashed your car, dummy."  Maps are plentiful in our truck, but seldom used due to the local knowledge crammed into these kids' heads.  There was a moment, after driving along the banks of the lake, where we truly came to understand the power of Super Duty.  The water line across the doors and the bent radio antenna left us all with nodding heads of approval upon arrival back at the station.  With its superior speaker system, V8 engine, comfy cab, and spacious side compartments, the Ford Super Duty is the highest rated truck among teenage seasonal government employees for overall bad-assed-ness.  And whenever you plow through a pothole full of water and the flume spurts above the car window, when a gravel road dives down suddenly into a crevasse-like pothole unavoidable, when a shoulder becomes a cliff edge all too soon but you manage to get back on flat ground, when a washboard in a turn reduces your truck to a one-ton toboggan, one must say "Super Duty" the way Peter Griffin says "Roadhouse" or a surfer says "Kowabunga." 

Webb Mountain Lookout, with the
butt of our Super Duty truck

After a week of orientations and introductions, our first set of marching orders came from Recreation who had us daily traveling to places to clean them.  Whether finding all the campgrounds in the 800K acres of forest or driving up old logging roads to mountain lookouts, we cleaned them all.  Especially fun was making a 26-point turn-around on exposed rock atop a foggy Webb Mountain.  As the fog burned off on a scorching Montana summer day, our lookout-cleaning and wood-chopping duties were treated to a spectacular view.  Soon after we had become adept at cleaning remote places, we were given a second set of orders, this time from Silviculture, and this is where that word that cannot be mentioned will be mentioned.  Vexar.  There, it is written.

Young larch in vexar

Silviculture is the study, maintenance, and manipulation of forested areas for diverse needs. I believe its true goal is to survey every inch of land in an area and know what all the trees are doing.  Right now, "silv" is all about the white pine and its 80% mortality in Montana from pine beetle infestation and a few other nasty diseases.  So, in our ranger district there exist logged-out areas replanted with white pine saplings in need of protection during their early years when their nitrogen-rich bodies are a tasty treat for animals.  Enter vexar.
It must stand erect on the hillside, must be threaded twice through by a bamboo stake tacked firmly into place (uphill if possible) around the sapling, and should not have any tree needles sticking through its meshiness when you come make your yearly walk-through maintenance treks.  Vexar maintenance is a  pathless, backcountry bushwhack whose results won't be seen for decades.  Upon arriving at one of the plots, you find vexar in a variety of conditions.  Most of the existing vexar is just fine, making the job seem like a walk through a field of upright cocoons.  The occasional sideways vexar always requires restaking and righting, while the more occasional "leaner" is sometimes left to lean one more year at least.  Some saplings have somehow escaped the vexar altogether and need to be re-surrounded.  Some saplings have been exposed to so much lovely sun that their immense prosperity is tinged only by their dried-up vexar cocoons disintegrating upon touch.  Still others have clearly outgrown their vexar and are ready for vexar-removal, the final liberation. Inevitably, if we happened to return the next day to the same field, we would find vexar we just righted to be leaning vexar because the forest animals bumped it overnight, which renders your work somewhat frustratingly useless.  However, the biggest issue with vexar comes from attempting simply to organize humans in lines among random points in an 80+ acre field in order to achieve 100% vexar maintenance.  To explain that I would require a white board and many colored pens, and you would require some caffeine source of your choosing and consumption.

Driving home from these plots of land set deep into hill country and forest land, each of us felt a great sense of relief coupled with a great wonder as to whether any of it truly mattered in the end.  We'll see if we were successful in 30 years, because another aspect of Silviculture is the pruning of 30+ year old growing white pines, aka the whittling away of up to 50% of the lower branches on each new tree to help avoid an environment ripe for diseased fungus.  For a few days, we played white pine barbershop, shorning up to 25-foot tall former vexar protectees on a hillside and bathing their lower trunks in healthy sunlight.  If all goes well, and if the white pines avoid all of the factors contributing to their blight, then our crew will have played a small but ongoing part in the rehabilitation of a beautiful species of tree.

Abandoned duck eggs a-go-go

Amphibian surveys near Bluebird Mtn.

Once Silviculture let us go, we became the daily/weekly grab bag of the ranger station.  One day, Fire sent us trekking in the truck on an all day scavenger hunt for wooden Forest Service signboards, replacing posted fireworks signs with campfire signs and trying to spend ten
hours doing so without stapling ourselves to a tree or to one another. The next day, Recreation sent us back up the lookout mountain to help lay the foundation of the Greatest Toilet Atop a Mountain Ever, hauling gravel all the way up, mixing concrete with sand and lime on-site, and pouring it into a rebar-faceted frame amid biting flies and swallowtail butterflies.  Yet another day, Wildlife took us to help them monitor bird boxes.  Ahhhh, I could check bird boxes all day.  Set around a lake and up trees, 3-4 boxes per lake stood awaiting our eyes, a few with eggs in them, cold and abandoned but blue and lovely, and a few with tiny broken shell fragments signaling a successful hatch.  Bushwhacking through soft grass is a pleasure and makes the sound of tossed eggs splashing into the lake and breaking a much easier reality to accept. We even spent a day with them counting amphibians in lakes, a task in which one diligent 6th grade fisherman from Wyoming actually surpassed us by finding more frogs and salamanders than we Forest Service workers.

The little cherubs of YCC
Murphy Lake and Eureka
Ranger Stations frolicking
among the cedars

After two weeks of glorious wedding time off, I returned to guide YCC's final two weeks, all with the much celebrated Trails crew.  Armed with axes, trowels, rock bars, pruners, chainsaws and gas, we joined the mountain goat-like, 3-person crew in the molding of paths previously alder-filled, brush-obscured, or otherwise non-existent.  We brushed over a mile of the Pacific Northwest Trail in one day under thundering skies and literally carved a half mile of a dirt bike path from scratch over two days, pulling up kinick kinick, rolling away rocks, and flattening the natural landscape in a four-foot long swath up, around, and down a few rolling hills.  On our last day, the Trails crew brought a dirt bike up that hill and let us each try out our new course, with the caveat that as much fun as riding DOWN the slope would be, you had to ride that puppy back UP for the next person.  Yeah.  Nearly toppling head over heels riding down the path and hitting rocks I had personally left in the path for 'texture', the entire experience reconfirmed for me that dirt bike trail riders are pretty awesomely crazy.
Add a pair of rewarding free days at the end, including treks into a several-hundred-year-old cedar grove and along slightly younger Kootenai Indian trails, and you have a perfect ending to a fairly luxurious and productive 10-week stint of outdoor government work.  For me, I found a myriad of exploratory avenues into our new home, nooks and crannies worth exploring, and a new found desire to turn off the pavement and onto gravel, to venture deeper into the world surrounding our next year of life in Eureka.  I was also left with a great appreciation of the skills, strength, and natural wisdom of these teenagers.  School smarts are one aspect of intelligence, but I learned so much from them this summer that I enter this next school year with a valuable respect for what all of their young minds may be capable of achieving.  So, sorry Eureka, my expectations have been raised and my plans have altered.  It's going to be one awesome school year.

Incidentally but not to be overlooked, our work this summer was unofficially subsidized by Spitz dill flavored sunflower seeds and lemon-lime Gatorade, and we also were a running advertisement for Ford's Super Duty ability to glide through five-foot mud puddles and up 45-degree rocky slopes with the greatest of ease.  But we really should have looked for sponsorship from a major sunblock/bug repellent company, a foot massage clinic, and various country and pop music artists whose tunes (specifically and repeatedly including "Truck Yeah", "something about Moving On", "a Minaj song where each line ended in "UUUH!(thanks Garrett)", "The Thunder Ro-o-olls", and  a very mellow version of "I Would Walk Five Hundred Miles") were the major soundtrack of a ten hour day, unless I managed to sneak in some Japanese folk music, Schoolhouse Rock, Mozart, Prokofiev, Yonder Mountain String Band, Martha Scanlan, or Beatles.  Nice.
  

Thanks for a great summer 'Kenzie, Garrett, Mikal, Louisa, and Ashlen.