Let's Talk About the Trees
MAIN POINTS: (i) Only Nick and his crew are authorized to remove trees (that means chain saws). (ii) Anyone is allowed to clear branches with hand saws, at your own risk. Mother Earth is pissed, and she's pushing back, hard. The weeks-long heat dome last summer, followed by the months-long drought, followed by record amounts of rain this fall, followed by a record amount of snowfall this month, followed by a record multi-day cold snap that froze the heavy snow to the tops of the tree branches ... well, you don't need to be an arborist to know what that means. The trees in the forest have been weakened by these extremes and are dropping: ten of them, 50 of them, hundreds of them, falling across the ski trails at Cabin Creek, night after night. Nick reports that he and his crew barely get a trail cleared of fallen trees and groomed before trees fall again. As Jonathan so aptly put it, "Nick is fighting a heroic fight, but I fear the trees are winning as they have us ou