I visited the West Mag area on my bike to view the results of the year-long logging project there.

Overall, I’m not unhappy with what has been done.  What makes me unhappy is all of the lies and bullshit justification for the project to begin with.  A lot of it were claims about pine beetles.  What’s left is worse than what pine beetles could have ever done.  Yeah, if you take away the forest, you won’t have a pine beetle problem.  That’s like tearing out a lawn because it has some weeds in it.  Don’t even get me started on fire mitigation.  The area is just a flammable in 40 MPH winds as it ever was.

Seventy percent of the trees removed here were alive and healthy.  Granted, the forest was mature and dense due to lack of fires.

A big question I have is, since the land is publicly owned by us, why can’t some of the wood be used by the public?  A huge number of homes here in the mountains are heated by wood.  Everything the government does benefits a private contractor.


Looking towards The Divide from forest road 355. (click for much larger.)

Looking towards The Divide from forest road 355. (click for much larger, then click again and use the scroll bar.)


I know this area really well. The landscape is now unfamiliar where the trees have been removed.  The points of reference my brain had are now gone.  Even though the road in the above photo is the exact same road that I’ve traveled a hundred times, it seemed I’d had never been on it before.  Every once in a while, I’d catch something familiar to connect then and now.


Large slash piles waiting to be burned.

Large slash piles waiting to be burned.


I’m sure that sooner or later, someone is going to come along and torch one of these piles.  They are sitting there like bonfires in the waiting.  From what I’ve read, there is no plan yet in place to do anything with them.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for some vegetation to re-grow in the cut areas.  While there is a little grass in the foreground of the photo above, most places are totally void of any living plant.

The project isn’t finished yet.  It will gradually move southward into Gilpin County.



After experiencing the driest second quarter (April, May, June) in recorded history, a dozen wildfires across the state, a wildflower-less landscape, and record breaking temperatures and dry wind, the rains have finally come.  I’ve received nearly 3 inches of precipitation over the past 3 days.  A little more is expected today.  Now, of course, the weather service has issued a flash flood watch.

The graph below shows the flow in Boulder Creek east of the dam.  Note that the water levels were about 1/4 of the historic average before the recent storms which are shown by the spike at the end of the graph.


Boulder Creek Streamflow, click for larger.

April, May, June are statistically our wettest months.

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Regarding the media coverage of forest fires, they commonly cite that the fires are worse due to the mountain pine beetle killing the trees.  In one local case, they stated the fire was burning in a tinder-dry beetle killed forest, when I knew for a fact there were very few beetle killed trees in that area. They will stop at no lengths to sensationalize a story.

The problem is, as we learned with the Bush administration, if you repeat something enough times, it becomes true in people’s minds.  This leads people to thinking that the pine beetles have to be dealt with in some way.  For example a large part of the forest near where I live, where people hike, camp, and ride bikes is going to be “patch cut”.  Patch cutting is removing all of the trees in large areas, similar to clear-cutting.

Remove the trees, and yes, the pine beetle “problem” goes away for obvious reasons.

Pine beetles have always been a part of the forests here.  They have been documented as being around for at least a hundred years and are probably a native species.  Their job is to keep the forests from getting overgrown, just like natural fires.  Based on my own observations, they don’t kill all of the trees. Thirty to forty percent continue to live.

Here is the link to the article:

CU-Boulder researchers: Pine beetles not always tied to increased fire danger