Flew over Meadow Creek today. Gonna be a hell of a work party next spring.



Still pics:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/newps/set ... 8417600775

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Tears

Could have been worse, though.

That's terrible. I was backpacking there in July, right before the fires started. Going to be a lot of sediment in the SF Flathead...no good for the fish.

This could have been a lot worse. It is still sad to see big changes transforming the backcountry so fast and starkly in my lifetime.

I can't understand why someone would prefer to see the place logged over.

It's not logged over, it is logged selectively so that there is access to fight the fires and to have less understory to burn so hot that it destroy's everything!
Put some cattle in there to keep the understory down also and to keep new growth every year instead of layer after layer of old grass burns so hot it makes it impossable for things to grow!

That's the theory, anyway. The numbers seldom support the theory as enthusiastically as the cattlemen and logging trade groups, unfortunately.

Selective *thinning* sales come up from time to time when a district is funded to offer them. They do a lot of good, but they are sold well below cost...a subsidy program for an industry to be sure, albeit with plenty of evidence for good outcomes for frequency and intensity of fires. The jury is still out on the effects of the various forms of selective *logging* - the results vary from possibly good to demonstrably bad.

An examination of grazing impacts on fire activity has been a well-travelled topic and yielded pretty clear results...it depends. Dry sage steppe can benefit, and more woody areas can be detrimented. In dryer years, even the steppes see declines in fire resistance with grazing. There are plenty of studies to choose from. There isn't a lot of daylight between their various conclusions.

Selective (as opposed to clearcut) logging and grazing often provide jobs and a future to regional economies, but they have less to do with fire outcomes than might be advertised. The conversation on the merits of both activities should probably stay wirh the economic or other facts than wander into wishful thinking territory on fire behavior. It is more complicated than simple sound bites in the middle of a bad fire season.

The Meadow Creek area will be a very different place for a long time.

lesuther wrote:....I can't understand why someone would prefer to see the place logged over.

Timber is rightly considered a renewable resource.
I live at the foot of Skidder Hill in the east Olympics, it is on its third harvest cycle since 1900.
My sister-in-law (from So Calif) asked me "how come this part has never been logged?" when she was looking at 50 or 60 year old reprod. She told me she couldn't believe all the trees we have on the north Olympic Peninsula, from what she'd read about the sin of clear-cutting she figured all we had left was stumps.
BTW I'm not a logger but my grandpa & great-uncle were both railroad loggers, and I had a number of uncles & cousins who worked in the woods too.

I talked to the ranger today for the Spotted Bear district which includes Meadow Creek. The outhouse burned up so we will have to replace that. We've(the MPA) got approval to put the new one closer to the area where people actually camp. We are thinking of putting up one just like the one at Schafer. The grass has already started growing again, less than a week after the fires largely got put out by the rain. That is good because the ranger said to expect up to 100,000 lodge pole pine seedlings per acre. The fire cause the trees to release their cones and open up.

Bonanza Man wrote:That is good because the ranger said to expect up to 100,000 lodge pole pine seedlings per acre. The fire cause the trees to release their cones and open up.

Yeah, it can be an amazing comeback with the right conditions. Cold Meadows is a good example of what a lodge pole fire succession looks like.

It could take some thinning efforts in 5-8 years for sure.

The grass has already started growing again, less than a week after the fires largely got put out by the rain. That is good because the ranger said to expect up to 100,000 lodge pole pine seedlings per acre. The fire cause the trees to release their cones and open up.

That's about 8 inch spacing. A lot of the Dollar Mt. fire in 1929 came back like that on the kettle crest in NE Washington. I was working there 47 years later and those trees were no bigger than a pencil.