Photo: Scene of Rocky Mountain National Park beetle kill.
Nearby here there is a small town. It grew up at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century around logging for the mine timbers and lumber for the mine buildings. Later the mill was converted to a two by four stud mill and logs for many get away log cabins were culled from the timber in the process. I recall not long ago that the train still came down the spur to pick up the pallets of studs and uncut cabin logs and the hardware store and lumber yards got supplies and finished goods delivered by the train.
The little town is surrounded by million of acres of National Forest. Although there was little noticeable evidence of logging, the Forest service bowed to pressure from environmentalists and gradually but relentlessly reduced logging operations in the surrounding national forest.
Environmentalists, generally, are people who don’t seem to need a job very bad. Usually they are escaping the crowded cities where they live and make their money. They build get away homes here so they can get a couple of weeks reprieve from the stress of their jobs and the hectic city life; or they retire here on a pension or inheritance. Around here we know that environmentalists are people who have already built their cabin in the woods.
Eventually the lumber company went out of business. All of the machines and buildings were auctioned off for scrap and the mill site itself was sold out of bankruptcy to speculators. The railroad shut down and now the spur is just used for storing old cars before they are sold to China for the scrap steel. The speculators who bought the mill site planned to build a town center there with shopping, a theater and grocery store. They thought that soon the many people building their get away cabin in the woods and the new ski resort expansion would create enough demand that a shopping center would be economically viable.
They were wrong. The environmentalists stopped the planned expansion of the little local ski resort. They claim it will cause too much pollution in the mountain stream even though a state of the art water treatment plan it planned and they claim the increased traffic will kill endangered and threatened species that are trying to cross the road. We know different because, you see, we know the environmentalists. We see them in the grocery store or at the gas station. In private conversations between assumed like minded people they will admit that they really do not want a bunch of people causing the ski pass price to go up and long waits at the lift lines. You see, they already have their cabin in the woods. But that’s another story.
A few years back a pine beetle infestation started up in Wyoming. The experts say this happens every hundred years or so. The environmentalists claim its caused by global warming. The pine beetles kill every pine and spruce tree over six inches in diameter wherever they infest and they spared though the forest like a wildfire. The big trees just die on the stump and turn the whole forest brown. Hundreds of millions of acres of forest pine and spruce have died from British Columbia to New Mexico. They have now infested our little area too. All the mountains around my town and the little nearby town I am talking about are brown now as far as I can see.
Dead standing beetle kill timber makes great house logs and lumber because the pine beetles only get into the area just under the bark. The best part of the tree is fine and the trees dry and cure naturally on the stump. The environmentalists won’t let them be harvested though, because they say the roads necessary to access the dead timber would cause too much damage and privately though down at the grocery store they tell us that they don’t want that much access for the tourists to get to the forest.
The problem is though that the dead timber is a huge fire hazard. If the logs aren’t harvested there will be massive forest fires and even in areas where there is not a fire then when the trees eventually fall down the forest will be so densely laden with fallen timber it will be impassable even for the animals. So the Forest Service is planning massive controlled burns of the forest to eradicate the dead standing and presumably the beetles too. Hundreds of millions if not billions of board feet of timber will go up in smoke. A lot of the evnirontmentalists don’t want that because the ifres might get out of control and burn down their cabins in the woods. Gee, wouldn’t that be a shame.
Meanwhile the real estate boom finally busted; and, with out a ski resort expansion or second home building, there was no way the new town center could be built on the old saw mill cite. Now just weeds grow there. There’s a twenty foot logger carved with a chain saw from a single log outside the local diner and the town still has a “Logger Days” celebration in the summer, but pretty much nobody does any logging around here anymore.
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