Pat & Sharon O'Toole: Routt blowdown, Hinman fire, pine beetles: Mother Nature speaks

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Modesto
Johnson Place gate
Routt National Forest
photo by Sharon O'Toole

Sometimes Mother Nature tells us something so loud and clear that we cannot ignore it. Today, we tended sheep camp on our Big Red Park allotment. The landscape there and the changes in it are so dramatic that they sweep away all illusion that natural processes are static.

In October 1997, an unusual weather phenomenon, a high altitude hurricane, swept in from the east—opposite of the usual prevailing winds—and blew down some 13,000 acres of trees in the Routt National Forest. We saw it from the air the following spring. It looked like a giant had cast down pickup sticks through drainage after drainage.

I forgot to tell our sheepherder, Victor, when he went up with the yearling sheep the following July. Soon I got a note on his grocery list, “Patrona, a lot of trees fell down!”

Some of the trees were logged, but many were too difficult to reach. In July and August of 2002, the Hinman Fire burned along for a month or more after lightning lit up the downed and dried timber. Finally, the blaze blew up, bringing out firefighting crews in full fury. Meghan and I went in two weeks later to pick up the tent that Pepe had abandoned as he fled the fire with all his sheep, horses and dogs. Charred stumps were still smoldering.

We did not graze the fire areas for three years, while the burned over areas recovered. Many of the pines had burned, leaving blackened standing timber. Most of the aspen survived, singed but intact.

Enter the pine beetle. Most readers of this blog have probably noted the increasing number of red trees as the pine beetles have made their march from dead trees into healthy stands. This is not a localized event, although the blow-down timber provided perfect conditions for the voracious beetles. Trees are dying from Alberta to New Mexico, and the visual impacts are graphic. The lack of cold winters, which kill beetle larvae, and the effects of drought have exacerbated the change in the forest.

We observed several things. Contrary to an earlier study, the area which had been logged, after the blowdown but before the fire, appear healthier, with more growth and ground cover regeneration. The pines which survived the fire are succumbing to the beetles.

The result will be a forest that is profoundly different than the one we always knew. The bare standing spires that will be left when the last of the red needles fall will eventually blow down, fall, or burn. Young pines may or may not take their place. The forest we have known used to be primarily Engelmann Spruce before a round of fires in the 1800’s. We have a lot of aspen, although many of them are ailing from “aspen blight.” Still, many of aspen will regenerate. All of this will leave a forest with a lot more grass cover since the pines will no longer keep light from reaching the forest floor. Water experts tell us that more runoff will occur.

Here are some of our observations.

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Trees: blown down, logged and burned
photo by Pat O'Toole