Alder Creek

The Forest Zone Field Laboratory will be based at the 80 acre Alder Creek Children's Forest. There will be a need to install 78 plots - one per forest acre during the next few years. Yesterday, when i was surveying the situation for next week's tree planting class, I ran into a crew from the Wolf Creek Job Corps - a juvenile training facility located out of Glide.
The crew was cleaning up tree blow-down that had spilled over onto a neighbor's property. The area had recently been thinned to remove douglas fir that had been killed by beetles, for reasons that can be explained at the ACCF Moodle site. The six youth and four adults - the neighbor, two ACCF volunteers and the WCJC team leader had six youth learning chainsaw and equipment use and maintenance, piling brush, cleaning up the damaged area, assessing the damage and interacting in appropriate and safe manner under difficult conditions.
Since the WCJC works through Brian Turner and the Wooley Center for high school diplomas and GEDs, Dr. Lenny will set up Tree Measurement Central to coordinate learning for this particular crew, which graduates February 19th. On Friday, February 10th, while the Riddle Education Center Youth are learning to plant trees, the Job Corps team will be installing the first of the 78 permanent plots on the ACCF site.
One further comment - the windstorm snapped quite a few trees, which may or may not have been aided by the logging that took place this fall. The ground is saturated and several of the blow-down trees came up from the roots and fell - something that logging would not have affected. Clearcuts and logging have their place in land management.
Now some eye candy from yesterday -