From the very beginnings of this wild foraged endeavor to bring the Forest to the People, I always had the idea of bringing the People back to the Forest, too.
The more time I spent foraging, the more I realized there's a BAD need for basic wildfire risk reduction in the form of ladder fuels removal and piling for later burning and biochar scattering.
Foraging and clearing ladder fuels with friends and helpers more recently has revealed the missing element of the modern Forest: Humans.
Spru-Seal® Organic Spruce Balms started in 2018 at Breckenridge Nordic Center as a product of my background in biomedical sciences and guiding snowshoe hikes mostly focused on the medicinal and wilderness survival uses of the flora surrounding the Cucumber Gulch Wetlands Nature Preserve for several of my first winters in Summit County.
Spreading the Spruce Healing in 2021 beyond Summit County over Monarch Pass and Wolf Creek Pass revealed a looming threat of severe, near total, annihilation of the high alpine spruce-fir forests by the Spruce Beetles, which means to my ecosystemic wholistic mind that we need to make our Forests ready to burn again.
Similar to controlling tick populations in both Forests & Grasslands, the best method to control spruce beetle larvae is controlled burning of the understory, where much of the spruce beetle larvae and eggs will overwinter, in the insulated decomposing materials beneath the feet of snow and sub-freezing temperatures above.
Here's a great pdf from Colorado State Forest Service about Subalpine Spruce-Fir Forest Stewardship and the Spruce Beetle Threat to an Unbalanced Forest Ecosystem:
Comments