Kaibab Plateau History   Don Bertolette   May 20, 2002 15:08 PDT  Lou- I look forward to your more leisurely response, even though your current comment seems to have captured a lot of what you might have intended to say. As with any good discussion, my post should have provided some definition of terms. Having spent some time in the Southeast and the Northeast, I know that our respective perceptions of wilderness vary, both formally and informally. Wilderness in it's purest sense, is anywhere that has evolved in the face of whatever disturbances that nature has thrown at it. It doesn't have to be verdant, shaded by lofty overstory...it doesn't have to have trees (we have some wonderful wilderness areas in the Southwest, rich in biological diversity, but poor in shading overstory), nor meandering bubbling brooks. Taking your message of no management in wilderness to heart, would have been easier, more appropriate if implemented prior to settlement (three to four centuries ago in your neck of the woods, one and a half in mine). In the 1870's the push west brought settlement to the Kaibab Plateau...the first disturbance was that of the introduction of sheep, then cattle, by way of the railroad...they consumed much of the abundant rich grasslands that once characterized the Southwest. With fine fuels diminished, the frequency of low intensity, high frequency fires diminished significantly. Shortly thereafter, with Teddy Roosevelt's creation of the Grand Canyon as a national park, legislated us to preserve and protect and decades of right-hearted but wrong-minded fire suppression followed. Neither we nor anybody else in those days thought that fire served any good purpose. Until the middle of the last century...Starker Leopold, son of Aldo began advocating a change in fire management policies in the parks...the Yellowstone fires rang those bells again, and the park service took the lead in advancing fire science, as the reality of decades of fire suppression became apparent. In the Grand Canyon NP, the ponderosa pine forest dominated much of the forested North and South Rims. While mapping vegetation there, I wandered through tall stately broad yellow barked, stag headed, big branched, old-growth ponderosa pines, visible above the invading white fir trees that have a foothold due to the exclusion of fires. It's a conundrum for any serious consideration of wilderness values...for those of us involved with the preservation and protection, inaction has the largest impact...we've had several thousand-acre fires, and the problem with no management is clear...without the high frequency, low intensity fire regime of the presettlement ecosystem, wildfires now are less often, but much more intense. Burn intensity is much higher in the current fire regime, as the abundant regeneration (try thousands of young trees per acre) provides a vertical pathway (also referred to as a "fuel ladder") from the grassy, fast fine low ground fuels, to the crowns of 3-400 year old old-growth ponderosa pines. We at the park have undertaken research that would incrementally return the park's forested ecosystem to a presettlement process. No tree greater than 5" dbh is thinned. No thinned tree leaves the site. To protect the old-growth ponderosa pines, our minimal treatment research proposes to thin trees (only 5 inches dbh and less) around old-growth (a distance equal to the average stand canopy height), and to rake away pine needle duff accumulations from the O-G PP bases (12-18 inches). On the South Rim, this would be done with chainsaws. On the North Rim, much of which is proposed wilderness, thinning would only be done by hand saws. In no case will new roads be constructed for this research, in no case will any heavy equipment be used for this research (although Bob may make snide comments as to my impact while traversing the forest!). One of the defining words in the wilderness act legislation is "untrammeled". We invite your further comments on whether our proposed research is 'trammeling or 'untrammeling'. If you'd like to participate in the public comment period (open for 45 days) for our Environmental Assessment, please navigate to www.nps.gov/grca/forest, where you'll find executive summary, the EA, Frequently Asked Questions, Photos and Press Releases, that will hopefully provide a more complete picture than I was able to portray in the above post... -Don B   Home