A lot of dead trees

[old goat]

30% of central and southern Sierra forest killed by fire, drought, and beetles.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics...267885597.html
(Hope it's not paywalled. I'll fix it if it is.)

[hatchgreenchile]

Beetles, beetles, everywhere

A common sight in the CO Rockies

[Joey Joe Joe Junior Shabadoo]

Work paid for me to take a felling class because we’ve started doing a lot more cutting for forest health and fire mitigation. The guy who taught it was a pro faller and he said that between fires and drought there were enough dead trees in CA to keep him cutting every summer for the next decade.


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[old goat]

Beetles, beetles, everywhere

A common sight in the CO Rockies

Not that bad here--except in burns--but a preview of what's to come I fear.

[XXX-er]

lotsa dead trees up here from the mountain pine beetle

https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/forests/fire...-insects/13397

[Meadow Skipper]

Trees are mortal, forests are dynamic, things change. And that climate thing…

[XXX-er]

ya i have paddled in tweedsmuir where the beetle started it doesn't look so bad cuz there are other trees growing

[dunfree]

There’s a whole lot of meadow that wasn’t long ago forest

at the thought of a felling class I’m wondering how my ggrandpa learned. I expect there was swearing and booze involved, but life was cheap

[XXX-er]

I wondered about that ^^cuz I've heard its a month long course up here to become a real Faller, it seems like now a lot of them are grandfathered in from bef ore it was a month long course

Angle Parking & I did fair amount of falling that i think we were not actualy qualifyed to do and sometoking too, it was probably old school to just wander out on the ski run to kill some trees but we had the gear we tried to follow whta we figured were best practises, nobody fucked up, nobody got hurt and a lot of forest became ski run,

with covid/ bad knee I quit doing it anymore

[whipski]

Ya 80-90% kill up at my ski hut. I was surprised how fast the small immature trees popped up after I downed the dead. A retired forest ranger from the San Juan talked about it would take 500 years for the south side of Wolf Creek to reach climax old growth again. In the same conversation he remarked how much better the skiing was after the needles and small branches came off. No more snow bombs coming off limbs. Just creamy skiing. I notice it's greening up like my property too.

[Cruiser]

Just this summer we had 28 trees dropped on our little half acre in the sawatch. Several of them had multiple pheromone packets from the last few years but the beetles got em anyway. I'm sad to see the trees gone but it's gonna make our aspens a lot happier and help mitigate our wildfire risk. We've gotten off easy so far though compared to some of the places I've been down in the San Juans which have got to be nearing 100% mortality on their spruce forests.

[I Skied Bandini Mountain]

Around here they say you need two weeks of -20 and below to keep the beetles in check, which isn't going to happen anymore. That plus 80 years of fire suppression, I say let it all burn.

[XXX-er]

I've heard its more like -40 to kill the beetle and its best if it happens early before falling snow insulates the base of a tree

[I Skied Bandini Mountain]

Yeah, that's probably it but it's not going to happen anymore.

[XXX-er]

well up here where it started there was regular -40 C which held them in check, but when that stopped it allowed the bug to migrate south to warmer climes or anywhere it could

used to drink beer with some pretty sharp scientists from the local office of the BC forest service, they have pretty much all retired, the trees are all dead and the bug is gone

[BCMtnHound]

Epidemic populations of beetles can sustain the epidemic with up to 90% mortality. So even if a cold snap does happen the population likely wouldn’t crash.

We’ve gone through the lodgepole, now the Doug Fir and Spruce beetle populations are on the rise (fires and drought being massive influencers of those population spikes).