Due to Joan’s bad hip and Skye’s hesitancy, I haven’t walked our trail for a while. In that absence we have experienced a lot of strong winds. Yesterday, I did get Skye to come along (I put her on a leash), and we made our way down the trail. The whole length of the trail was scattered with smallish broken branches that had been blown off the trees, and I picked them up and threw them aside as we progressed. There must have been a small branch every ten paces,
When we got to the place where two big birches had blown over about 3 weeks ago (they blew away from the trail, so they weren’t a problem), I discovered that a big spruce had been blown down and it was totally blocking the trail. It was situated in a way that made walking around it very difficult. Skye and I had to push our way through the branches under the tree to get by. Clearly if we were going to continue using the trail, something had to be done.
So in the afternoon, I fired up the old chainsaw, hiked down the trail, and cut away a chunk of the tree’s trunk, so the trail could once again be used.
When I was working for the BC Forest Service, we often had to do different sorts of silvicultural surveys. The way that was usually done, was that in a measured out area, samples of what you were looking for were counted, then that number was multiplied by the whole area that you were interested in, giving you an idea of the total you could expect.
Walking the trail yesterday and finding so many branches that had blown down on the trail, I thought, if I was to measure the area in the trail then multiplied that by the total area of the forest, an amazingly large number of branches came down in the wind, and I find branches down after every wind. It seems like all the trees should be stripped of all the branches by now, but forests are dynamic things that keep on growing and changing.
Below is a photo showing the opening I made that will enable us to continue to walk the trail.
Take a look at my paintings: www.davidmarchant.ca
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