The road less pined

Thursday, July 29, 2010

By Matthew Irwin

On the final stretch of the tourist-friendly hike to Little Devils Tower in the Black Hills of South Dakota, my friend Martin asked if I had seen or read The Road. I had, and so I understood that the landscape reminded him of Cormac McCarthy's suffocating post-apocalyptic novel.

Ponderosa pines lie scattered, stacked, hapless, across the slope, as far as the eye could see, victims of the mountain pine beetle, quarantined by Custer State Park officials to prevent further infestation. We could practically still smell fresh sawdust and chainsaw gasoline, still see the smoke rising.

When we started our hike, Martin (a logger-turned-artist) apologized for the devastation, wondering why the park service was building a road up the slope. Then, he saw the familiar slash piles of treetops and branches, and knew that the park service wasn't just cutting down trees. Somebody had been logging the area.
Last year, park officials hired a private contractor to haul infested trees out, telling the public that the pines are still useable as timber. The four years previous, the park service had been simply chopping the trees into two-foot chunks and leaving them in the forest. Park officials say that these processes kill about 85 percent of the beetles and interrupt the life cycle by removing larvae from the area.

Signs along the hike explained the effort as “Salvaging our Future,” which I noted read like “Savaging our Future,” with too quick a glance and perhaps an awareness of the carnage.

When I told Martin that some people are starting to think that pine beetle devastation is cyclical and that the trees will return, he told me about Frank Thomson's autobiography, Ninety-six Years in the Black Hills, which was published in 1974 and describes a similar pine infestation marked by red trees during the author's youth.

Because of the steep terrain, the signs said, the contractor used helicopters to lift the pines to a processing area, which the logging company had created by carving a road along the Little Devils Tower trail. What didn't then get hauled out by truck, remained there, scattered, bent and broken, as if the devil had jumped from the tower and slid down the mountain.

In 2009-2010, the park service paid the contractor more than $500,000 to remove more than 18,500 ponderosa pines, which officials say has stabilized the beetle population growth.

At the Little Devils summit, we could no longer see the path of destruction leading up, but just across the valley in the Black Elk Wilderness, big blotches of red dotted the black forest. Being wilderness, it's left to its own devices, but Custer State Park officials say that many of the li’l buggers from Black Elk holiday in the park with the rest of the tourists who leave food on the trail.

Sooner rather than later, however, officials think that the beetles will find themselves on the pine-less highway, having eaten themselves out of Black Elk Wilderness and having been deported from Custer State Park. JHW

photo by MATTHEW IRWIN
A slope once home to ponderosa pine trees.


PERMALINK:
The road less pined | Planet JH News Article: Editorial

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