Pat & Sharon O'Toole

Raking hay, evening shadows
Home Ranch
photo by Pat O'Toole

It is the time of year when summer is tipping over into fall. We are still doing summer things—putting up hay, tending sheep camps and checking cows and calves on the forest permits, riding fences. We do these things, but fall is sneaking in all around us.

Temperatures are definitely cooler, though we have not yet had a freeze. I didn’t manage to put a garden in this year, but neighbors are offering piles of squash. Relatives visiting from Grand Junction, Colorado brought us blessed peaches and fresh tomatoes. (Two things money can’t buy—true love and home-grown tomatoes.) Olathe corn is showing up at roadside markets and in the grocery store. All these are signs that harvest time is definitely all around.

While we look at the calendar and know that our forest off-dates are weeks away, the livestock are beginning to get restless. Some of the trouble-makers are trying to make their way down the roads and pathways to the home ranch. Soon, our neighbors will be calling. “I’ve got two of your cows. I’ll drop them off and pick up that bull of mine that you picked up.” We try to convince the stock that they’re leaving better feed behind than they have ahead of them. The forest this year has gotten rains, while the desert still bakes with drought.

One of the pleasures of the season is seeing the predictable turning of earth’s timetable, and with it the glorious appearance of golden and rusty leaves. This year we are watching the trees turn, but many of them are afflicted with insects and disease. The forest is changing before our eyes, and for the rest of our lives. The Routt and Medicine Bow National Forests, like most in the Rocky Mountain West, are losing their pines and spruce trees to beetles. The trees are drought stressed, and the warmer winters have allowed the insects to overwinter and explode in numbers. Whole hillsides of conifers are turning red as we watch, week by week.

The aspen, too, have “aspen blight,” whatever that is. Their leaves are dying and falling off, without their usual spectacular golden interval. Many aspen groves, including Wyoming’s famed “Aspen Alley”, show barren trucks with dried and dying leaves.

Fires will follow, this year, or the next, or the next. Some other trees will grow up and take the place of these, but it will never again be the forest we knew, which seemed so immutable.

Dying aspens on Sheep Mountain (with oak in foreground)
Carbon County, Wyoming
photo by Sharon O'Toole

Aspen Alley, aspen blight
Medicine Bow National Forest, Wyoming
photo by Pat O'Toole

Beetle-killed pine on Farwell Mountain
Routt National Forest, Colorado
photo by Pat O'Toole

Dead pines near Dillon, Colorado
photo by Sharon O'Toole