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Monday and Tuesday presented various opportunities for gruesome death, and those days are always interesting. We finally got to tackle some Russian olive trees, a weed for which I have an almost unusual level of personal distaste (and so do the chainsaw wielding members of the forest crew, who actually had to wrestle the beasts to the ground.) Opportunity for gruesome death number one was the multiple chainsaws. Number two was the chipper, a lovely machine with a diagram on the side of a stick man getting his hand caught in the cutting wheel and being pulled in to his death. The nature of this work necessitated constantly wearing a helmet and ear plugs. I like ear plugs because they keep me from going deaf, but I find that they become uncomfortable after 30 minutes, and painful after an hour. We were working in a large field that looked like a normal grassland, but it was actually irrigated (for the benefit of cattle, I suppose) so there were a lot of mushy spots, and we spent most of Monday morning in several inches of water that instantly soaked my feet and kept them soggy for the rest of the day.
Russian olives are hard to kill. They grow in a highly branched, bushy pattern that never presents a single, easy cut (unlike, say, most pine trees) and their hard wood stubbornly resists the bite of the chainsaw, much to the chagrin of the FEMP crew, who are all pretty awesome and hardcore guys to spend all day working in the sun with a tool that is heavy, hot, loud, sometimes breaks down, and works at a painfully slow rate against these damnable tree-weeds. I don't think I would have held up so well. Our job was comparatively easy, hauling trees and loading the chipper, and applying chemical to the stumps as soon as the trees were cut. The herbicide we used is called Garlon 4, which we usually use in dilution, but in this case it was 100 percent, the better, hopefully, to keep the Russian olives from resprouting, which they are very good at doing. We have to wear long pants and long sleeves and big rubber gloves when using chemicals, which intensifies the July heat. Also, Russian olive trees have thorns, but another tree we were also cutting, honey locust, is covered, trunk and limbs, in profusions of four inch long thorns that branch like antlers to many sharp, sharp points. You can bet between the heat, unwieldy power tools, and wooden spikes stinging through leather work gloves as easily as our own skin that there was a lot of cursing Monday and Tuesday. I did a lot of chemical, so I came out relatively unscathed -- minus an ugly scratch from a barbed wire fence -- but most of my coworkers look like they've been mauled.
Was it worth it? Well, I find that jobs requiring vigilance for safety make the day go faster, and we got to do something different, and most of all we got to kill Russian olives. On Tuesday afternoon we hauled out two tons of wood chips in our trailer, along with two other similarly sized and similarly filled trailers. Times two days, that's about 12 tons of weeds removed from the landscape, and the cool thing about killing big weeds is that you can really see the change you're making in the landscape -- in this case, opening it up and restoring it to plains grassland.
We also took down a few cottonwood trees, two of them twenty feet tall, healthy and beautiful. Why? We've decided this area is supposed to be a grassland, which means no trees, even if they are natives. I disagree. Cottonwoods mainly grow along riparian areas, yes, but they certainly can grow out on the plains away from obvious sources of water. Cottonwoods are beautiful natives. They're the good guys. Anyway, they were growing along a stream, albeit a manmade one. If we really wanted it to be a natural grassland, we'd eliminate the irrigation and the cows and let nature take its course with the cottonwoods while still working to remove the Russian olives and locust trees. Of course I think we did a lot more good than harm -- about twenty four thousand pounds of good, actually -- but I wish we'd have left the cottonwoods.
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This has been the windiest winter! Whitney and I went for a walk on the 13th, and we couldn't have picked a clouder, windier day for it. Really, the conditions were pretty unpleasant. Luckily for us, hiking in bad weather builds character, or something. It was a trail I've never seen, despite its nearness -- the Coalton trail in Superior, off of McCaslin Blvd. It was a few miles east of the trailhead for the Greenbelt Plateau trail that we hiked on Valentine's. It was a strange trail -- really more of an unpaved road -- that was broad and rocky with a wire fence on either side, and arrow-straight. The first mile and a half led through a large prairie dog colony and past it, climbing a hill and revealing a great view of grassland and mountains as it made a 90 degree turn south. The prairie dogs, protected from interlopers by the fencing, were mostly unconcerned with us, which made for some good up-close viewing of the highly social little fuzzballs, who are a very important part of the ecosystem and couldn't be cuter if they tried.
Atop the hill there was a view of the mountains I've never quite seen before in all my years of looking at these mountains -- the long crest of the hill sloped down into a grassy valley with a tiny, unnamed pond. More khaki, grassy hills rolled toward the mountains. It was as we continued down the trail that we began to feel an incredible amount of solitude. It was only a few miles to the cookie-cutter subdivisions on the other side of McCaslin, but we hadn't seen another human since we parked, nor could we hear any traffic noise despite relatively near highways. What we could see of the city looked very far away, and the only immediate sign of civilization was the high-tension power lines (or whatever they were) running parallel to the trail. But they represented the same sort of absentee civilization as empty office buildings, and didn't count. We were on a dirt road out in the country somewhere, alone but for the howling wind and the occasional appearance of a bird of prey, in a hilly sea of short brown grass.
I wore two hoods, more to keep the wind off my ears than for the cold. Persistent wind hurts my ears and dries out my eyes, and I hate it, but I think I'm finally getting used to it. Maybe the clouds were a blessing, since there wasn't a tree within two miles. Obtaining such solitude, with such open views is a remarkable thing when you're just outside a big city. Most of the land we explored is protected as part of the city of Boulder's massive open space green belt, and it's impossible not to be grateful to the people who had the foresight to preserve it, and it's amazing, humbling and extremely gratifying to think that come Monday I'll be working in places like this. I finally managed to get a job, as a seasonal Integrated Pest Management (IPM) technician with the City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks department. "Pests" in this case are invasive plant species -- weeds -- that I'll be helping to control on open space lands.
Eventually, Highway 128 came into view, and the Coalton trail merged into the High Plains Trail, where the dirt road and fencing gave way to a narrow footpath with no fences, which was a nice change of pace even if it did make walking side by side more challenging. We wound around a few hills, crossed a little wooden boardwalk over a drainage, where there was at last a few trees, and then came to another, slightly longer little bridge where we stopped to rest and eat snacks and enjoy each other's company. We had the grassy plains all to ourselves, and the sun was peeking out.
We were already pretty tired, so it was a long walk back in the wind. When we reached the Coalton trail again, we finally caught sight of some humans -- one man running, four women with a dog, and one man on a bike. As we started down the final hill on the home stretch the ungainly subdivisions and offices of Superior and Broomfield lay suddenly ahead. I figure it was about a seven mile walk, all together. After four hours in the wind, it was nice to get in the car, where it was warmer and not windy at all.
Posted by Cynomys at 04:23 AM in Journal -- Other | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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How we can beat weeds
A method occured to me the other day about how we could actually win the battle against weeds (and other invasive species) if we really wanted to. All we have to do is restructure our economy, so that instead of being built to serve humans, the economy is focused on serving nature. Then IPM would be a major industry, employing tens of thousands of people in the Denver area alone, and instead of a few small weed crews watching in frustration as weeds take over even as they battle valiantly to stem the tide, we'd see weeds steadily cut back, until, a few generations from now, they wouldn't be a problem at all.
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