MY CAREER HAS BEEN FOR THE TREES. I earned a university degree in forestry and worked for five years as a wildland firefighter. My education and my work as a firefighter instilled in me “The Prescription” for both how to manage forests and how to stop wildfires. Nineteen years ago, with entrepreneurial enthusiasm and a …
By George Sibley
The onset of the wildfire season puts our forests back on the front page, but the wildfires are really just a visible symptom of larger troubles among the trees – troubles that track those “natural disasters” right back to us humans and some naive cultural choices.
By Hal Walter
A recent writing assignment had me exploring historical points in my immediate geographical area, and it occurred to me, as it has many times over the years, how many people have made either permanent or temporary homes in this area long before we arrived with our four-wheel-drives, heated homes and Internet connections.
My neighbor Gary Ziegler, an archaeologist by trade and owner of Bear Basin Ranch, has recently been investigating the occurrence of “culturally modified” trees on his property and the surrounding area. Ziegler has made a career out of finding and unearthing lost Inca cities in Peru, but it’s possible another history lesson has been right under his nose since he bought Bear Basin in 1972.
By Christopher Kolomitz
Molly on the Move
LEADVILLE – Climax Mine shipped its first bag of molybdenum concentrate on May 10 following a restart of the legendary mine atop Fremont Pass in Lake County. It was the first “moly” to be shipped from the mine in 17 years, the Leadville Herald Democrat reported. The mine first opened in 1916 and was a major economic stimulus to the region for decades before finally shutting completely down in 1995. Restart of the mine began in 2010 and has totaled about $700 million with projections that 20 million pounds of moly will be produced by 2013. About 300 people work at the mine which is owned by Freeport-McMoRan. In early May the company foundation awarded more than $550,000 to non profit organizations in Lake, Chaffee and Summit counties.
Review by Jeanne Englert
Trees – May 1998 – Colorado Central Magazine
Aspen: Blazon of the High Country
Text by Ann Zwinger
Photographs by Barbara Sparks
Published in 1991 by Peregrine Smith Books
ISBN 0-87905-324-0
Essay by Martha Quillen
Trees – August 1997 – Colorado Central Magazine
Dear Readers,
Recently Ed got an E-mail from a friend who passed on this impenetrable little Zen koan:
If a man speaks in the forest and there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?
Columbine and I both answered “yes,” immediately. After all, wrong is wrong.
