Category Archives: environment

Take the 1908 Civil Service Exam for Forest Ranger

Think You Have What It Takes To Be a Forester? Here’s the a log scaling question: Name a log scale in common use in your locality and give the contents of logs of the following sizes by this scale: 16 feet long and 26 inches in diameter small end 18 feet long and 30 inchesContinue reading “Take the 1908 Civil Service Exam for Forest Ranger”

Save Trees, Use More Paper

Earlier this year, Kevin Periera of G4 told Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal, the Amazon Kindle “is the savior to many, many forests in the future.” [Read it here] As a licensed forester and certified treehugger, I don’t think so. Trees don’t get cut down when you use electronic stuff, right? Well they may be, forever. TheContinue reading “Save Trees, Use More Paper”

Copter 104

Yesterday was a pretty quiet and relaxing Sunday. The flock of pubescent girls that had been squawking Friday and Saturday, migrated back to roost elsewhere and we were allowed to listen to the lake lapping at the shore once more. Around 1:30 PM, we got a visit from my former neighbors. I used to workContinue reading “Copter 104”

The Chance of a Lifetime

It was the chance of a lifetime: going into the backcountry to search for section corners and quarter-section corners set by surveyors one-hundred and one years before. The fly-in-the-ointment was that the surveyors probably had done their work while perched on a barstool in 1882. Someone knew how to nurse a beer. In cadastral surveyingContinue reading “The Chance of a Lifetime”

Sections, Townships, and Range

A long time ago (call it 1983) in a place far, far, away (call it Mountain Home State Forest), a small band of courageous neophyte surveyors began a project that many in the California Department of Forestry hierarchy felt to be impossible. We started work on finding, and then marking, the precise boundaries of MountainContinue reading “Sections, Townships, and Range”

My Old Day Job

I worked as the assistant forest manager at Mountain Home State Forest from 1979-1986. The old joke asks, “Where do forest rangers go to ‘get away from it all?’” As if working in the forest was not, well, work. I remember days when I’d been stung by wasps, hiked cross-country through thorny buckbrush in theContinue reading “My Old Day Job”