In 1978, I was just beginning my career with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). I worked in the southern Sierra Nevada range as the Assistant Forest Manager at Mountain Home State Forest. The federally managed 1.2 million acre Sequoia National Forest surrounded the 4800-acre state forest. On most of theContinue reading “Managing That Wild Natural Look”
Tag Archives: Mountain Home State Forest
Trees ain’t thermometers
I used to work on Mountain Home State Forest in the southern Sierra. MHSF has about 3000 specimen-sized sequoia within its boundaries. Dendrochronolgists often visited to see the stumps from logging in the mid to late 1800s. These were often over 2000 years old when they had been cut. The Dendrochronolgists were interested in theContinue reading “Trees ain’t thermometers”
Weekend Postcard from Mountain Home State Forest
I was the Assistant Forest Manager at Mountain Home State Forest in the early 1980’s. Mountain Home Demonstration State Forest is a 4,800 acre tract of forest land in Tulare County managed by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The State Forest lies within the Tule River watershed some 22 air miles northeastContinue reading “Weekend Postcard from Mountain Home State Forest”
Green, Inc.
Fear motivates. Fear was the reason I got into forestry. When I was in college (I grew up in the 1960s and graduated high school in 1969), Martin Litton’s iconinc picture of a boy looking out over a large clearcut of redwoods caused a number of us to take action. The Photos Were a SnapshotContinue reading “Green, Inc.”
Green Giant Politics
My wife and I are members of the Sierra Club. She, because she supported their agenda. Me, because I want to know what the arguments are going to be about. The other day, we found a mailer from the Sierra Club imploring us to write the President, the Speaker of the House, and the SenateContinue reading “Green Giant Politics”
Life imitates art
This BBC story, Survey turns hill into a mountain, about Mynydd Graig Goch in Snowdonia in Wales sounds like the movie that starred Hugh Grant, The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. Maggie Mountain in the Sierra Nevada I’ve worked in the Sierra Nevada at Mountain Home State Forest. IContinue reading “Life imitates art”
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”
Nullius in Verba 