(part 1)
http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-92000374/
The Los Angeles Times
Dec. 14, 2016
The 102 million dead trees in California's forests are turning tree cutters into millionaires
BY THOMAS CURWEN
A low gargle echoes against granite cliffs and resounds in the wooded canyons.
Each pull of a starter handle and squeeze of a throttle is punctuated by the crack of splintering wood as another dead tree falls in a forest that’s changing all too rapidly.
Niles Kant stands at the base of a red fir. Its crown, a thatch of brown needles, rises nearly 175 feet above a collection of cabins in the national forest.
The fir, partially cut at its base and tethered to a rope that will direct its fall, is one of nearly 20 trees that Kant and his crew will drop today, a volume that can never keep pace with the need.
Estimates by the U.S. Forest Service put the number of dead trees in California forests at 102 million, broad swaths that officials call a wildfire and public safety risk. Declaring a state of emergency last fall when the count stood at 40 million, Gov. Jerry Brown ordered state agencies to clear the hazards.
The die-off has hit the southern half of the Sierra Nevada range — Fresno and Tulare counties — especially hard. The Forest Service estimates more than 24 million trees in this region are dead, and getting rid of them has become both a problem and an opportunity.
“There is a Gold Rush for those of us who are willing to bust ass,” says Kant, who charges $1,700 a day for his services.
Kant, 49, owns the Huntington Lake Tree Service, one of more than two dozen outfits working along California 168 that begins just east of Fresno and ends at Huntington Lake, elevation 7,000 feet.
Since first arriving in these mountains in 1997 — and starting a firewood company 15 years ago — Kant has watched as drought, beetle infestation and warming temperatures, all symptoms of climate change, have transformed the mountains he loves.
“I used to think that nothing could affect us in the forest, but between the fires and the drought, the forest is hurting,” he says.
Today, he and his crews are rushing to beat the approach of winter when storms and snowfall shut down the higher elevations and the income that this disaster has delivered to them, one tree at a time.
The fir’s crown starts to tremble, and the back cut grows wider. Kant steps away. His son, Brock, kills the saw. The guide rope is cinched tight, and Garrett McGee delivers one final shot, his sledgehammer clinking against the wedge.
A terrible groaning from the stretching and tearing of wood fibers fills the campground.
Picking up speed, the fir crashes through the surrounding canopy. Severing its limbs and those of neighboring trees, it lands with the force of a 10-ton truck hitting a wall at 90 miles per hour, an explosion gauged to be the equivalent of four pounds of TNT.
The impact kicks up a gust of wind. Branches, bark and duff fly. The surrounding mountains capture the echo. Then there is silence.
“Beautiful, Bubba,” Kant shouts to his son.
This October morning, with temperatures rising from a low of 28, Kant is running three crews on the north side of the lake. His occasional partner Craig Erickson is helping.
Erickson, 40, drove in the previous night from his home and business — Koala Tree Care — in the Santa Cruz area to help bring down a 700-year-old Ponderosa pine, located in a nearby condominium development.
What takes hundreds of years to grow can be brought down in less than five minutes with a chainsaw, a sledgehammer and a couple of wedges. But the Creepy Tree — so named by the children of the neighborhood with their Harry Potter imaginations — will take two days.
Growing on a hillside in a sunlit glade, the pine is nearly 200 feet tall, 7 feet across at the base, its bark richly furrowed. Each branch, angling skyward, could be its own tree and just as doomed as the others in the forest, their limbs clothed with shocks of brown needles.
With spurs on his boots and a rope lasso, Erickson shimmies up a smaller adjacent tree before swinging over to one of the Creepy Tree’s branches. He moves with the ease and confidence that 20 years of climbing trees have given him.
“Caleb, can you check the air filter and make sure it’s clean?” he shouts to the ground crew that prepares his chainsaws for him.
Kant employs mostly young men in their 20s, who started working straight out of high school. Union work was too unpredictable, trade school to expensive. They are drawn to the excitement and danger of the job — and the pay ($14 to $20 an hour based on experience).
He and Erickson met at the local bar. Erickson, whose family has been coming to these mountains since 1915, was nursing an iced tea — anything stronger is incompatible with the demands of the job — and Kant needed advice on a tree growing near the deck of a house. Many years later, they’re still teaming up on difficult jobs.
Kant explains their strategy: “We’re going to take the branches off, blow the top down in sections, and when it’s short enough, we’ll drop the stick in that direction.”
He points east, a neat trick given the tree’s southerly tilt toward a few aspens, cherished by the property owner, and the living rooms and kitchens, valued by the next-door neighbors.
Overhead, the chainsaw pops — it’s a 460 with a 32-inch bar — and blond shavings, lit by the sun through a haze of exhaust fumes, surround Erickson. Soon a branch almost 3 feet across crashes to the ground.
That branch stole the scene in a photograph taken Aug. 4, 1927, when this quiet grove became the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” Actors in Elizabethan costume are pictured strutting and fretting their hour upon an outdoor stage raised in the shadow of this pine that was already a veteran of this forest when the playwright crafted his work.
But in recent years, the tree was unable to fight off an infestation. Lacking enough water — at least 250 gallons a day during the summer — it couldn’t produce enough pitch to push out the beetles as they bored in.
The speed of this assault has surprised most everyone living here, beginning in the lower elevations and marching higher. How many trees did you lose this year is now how many trees did you lose this month.
http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-92000374/
The Los Angeles Times
Dec. 14, 2016
The 102 million dead trees in California's forests are turning tree cutters into millionaires
BY THOMAS CURWEN
A low gargle echoes against granite cliffs and resounds in the wooded canyons.
Each pull of a starter handle and squeeze of a throttle is punctuated by the crack of splintering wood as another dead tree falls in a forest that’s changing all too rapidly.
Niles Kant stands at the base of a red fir. Its crown, a thatch of brown needles, rises nearly 175 feet above a collection of cabins in the national forest.
The fir, partially cut at its base and tethered to a rope that will direct its fall, is one of nearly 20 trees that Kant and his crew will drop today, a volume that can never keep pace with the need.
Estimates by the U.S. Forest Service put the number of dead trees in California forests at 102 million, broad swaths that officials call a wildfire and public safety risk. Declaring a state of emergency last fall when the count stood at 40 million, Gov. Jerry Brown ordered state agencies to clear the hazards.
The die-off has hit the southern half of the Sierra Nevada range — Fresno and Tulare counties — especially hard. The Forest Service estimates more than 24 million trees in this region are dead, and getting rid of them has become both a problem and an opportunity.
“There is a Gold Rush for those of us who are willing to bust ass,” says Kant, who charges $1,700 a day for his services.
Kant, 49, owns the Huntington Lake Tree Service, one of more than two dozen outfits working along California 168 that begins just east of Fresno and ends at Huntington Lake, elevation 7,000 feet.
Since first arriving in these mountains in 1997 — and starting a firewood company 15 years ago — Kant has watched as drought, beetle infestation and warming temperatures, all symptoms of climate change, have transformed the mountains he loves.
“I used to think that nothing could affect us in the forest, but between the fires and the drought, the forest is hurting,” he says.
Today, he and his crews are rushing to beat the approach of winter when storms and snowfall shut down the higher elevations and the income that this disaster has delivered to them, one tree at a time.
The fir’s crown starts to tremble, and the back cut grows wider. Kant steps away. His son, Brock, kills the saw. The guide rope is cinched tight, and Garrett McGee delivers one final shot, his sledgehammer clinking against the wedge.
A terrible groaning from the stretching and tearing of wood fibers fills the campground.
Picking up speed, the fir crashes through the surrounding canopy. Severing its limbs and those of neighboring trees, it lands with the force of a 10-ton truck hitting a wall at 90 miles per hour, an explosion gauged to be the equivalent of four pounds of TNT.
The impact kicks up a gust of wind. Branches, bark and duff fly. The surrounding mountains capture the echo. Then there is silence.
“Beautiful, Bubba,” Kant shouts to his son.
This October morning, with temperatures rising from a low of 28, Kant is running three crews on the north side of the lake. His occasional partner Craig Erickson is helping.
Erickson, 40, drove in the previous night from his home and business — Koala Tree Care — in the Santa Cruz area to help bring down a 700-year-old Ponderosa pine, located in a nearby condominium development.
What takes hundreds of years to grow can be brought down in less than five minutes with a chainsaw, a sledgehammer and a couple of wedges. But the Creepy Tree — so named by the children of the neighborhood with their Harry Potter imaginations — will take two days.
Growing on a hillside in a sunlit glade, the pine is nearly 200 feet tall, 7 feet across at the base, its bark richly furrowed. Each branch, angling skyward, could be its own tree and just as doomed as the others in the forest, their limbs clothed with shocks of brown needles.
With spurs on his boots and a rope lasso, Erickson shimmies up a smaller adjacent tree before swinging over to one of the Creepy Tree’s branches. He moves with the ease and confidence that 20 years of climbing trees have given him.
“Caleb, can you check the air filter and make sure it’s clean?” he shouts to the ground crew that prepares his chainsaws for him.
Kant employs mostly young men in their 20s, who started working straight out of high school. Union work was too unpredictable, trade school to expensive. They are drawn to the excitement and danger of the job — and the pay ($14 to $20 an hour based on experience).
He and Erickson met at the local bar. Erickson, whose family has been coming to these mountains since 1915, was nursing an iced tea — anything stronger is incompatible with the demands of the job — and Kant needed advice on a tree growing near the deck of a house. Many years later, they’re still teaming up on difficult jobs.
Kant explains their strategy: “We’re going to take the branches off, blow the top down in sections, and when it’s short enough, we’ll drop the stick in that direction.”
He points east, a neat trick given the tree’s southerly tilt toward a few aspens, cherished by the property owner, and the living rooms and kitchens, valued by the next-door neighbors.
Overhead, the chainsaw pops — it’s a 460 with a 32-inch bar — and blond shavings, lit by the sun through a haze of exhaust fumes, surround Erickson. Soon a branch almost 3 feet across crashes to the ground.
That branch stole the scene in a photograph taken Aug. 4, 1927, when this quiet grove became the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” Actors in Elizabethan costume are pictured strutting and fretting their hour upon an outdoor stage raised in the shadow of this pine that was already a veteran of this forest when the playwright crafted his work.
But in recent years, the tree was unable to fight off an infestation. Lacking enough water — at least 250 gallons a day during the summer — it couldn’t produce enough pitch to push out the beetles as they bored in.
The speed of this assault has surprised most everyone living here, beginning in the lower elevations and marching higher. How many trees did you lose this year is now how many trees did you lose this month.