“Nine degrees,” I called out, thigh-deep in the beaver pond. On the bank, foot propped on an aspen log, Sam Bixler recorded the temperature. My other partner, Dave Bolger, called out the water temperature some 60 feet upstream from the slack water of the beaver pond: “Five degrees.” The icy stream was Pennock Creek, elevation […]
Chuck Bolsinger
Posted inWotr
Backcountry lessons from the Lost Forest of Oregon
The Scout we were driving across the treeless landscape was coated with dust so thick you couldn’t read the decal identifying us as scientists from a Forest Service Research Station. Had the decal been legible, an observer might have thought we were lost. We weren’t, but the forest that my work-partner, Doug, and I were […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2008: Reluctant Boomtown
Biofuel won’t do it
BIOFUEL WON’T DO IT Sugar cane’s efficiency in producing ethanol is 800 percent compared with 130 percent for corn, as others have mentioned (HCN, 2/4/08). Currently, our sugar cane lands in Hawaii are fallow or growing eucalyptus trees. But even if we replanted cane to all these lands and also to suitable lands in our […]
Posted inWotr
Bigfoot, you’re invited to breakfast
A few years before the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington, I worked on a timber-cruising crew near that mountain. We stayed in a barn-like lodge and ate at a nearby diner. During breakfast one morning, Harry R. Truman, who owned Harmony Falls Lodge on Spirit Lake, came in. He was wearing an […]