It’s been fifteen years since we started our CREP conservation program, and every year has brought new challenges.
2012 flood season
Floods have continued to erode our creek bank, washing new plantings and mature trees downstream, overflowing the lower areas and burying young trees in debris.
Despite those seasons of too much water, drought has been the primary threat. Many of the Western Red Cedars in the higher areas died over the last few years. Our native Red and White Alders are dying off rapidly, and I’m not seeing many young alders coming up in their place.
Weed pressure never stops, but some years our time and energy did, making the following year that much harder to catch up. We lost most of a year when one of our parents needed round the clock care, and we just didn’t have anything left to give to the trees. Depression, frustration, a feeling of hopelessness takes over, when you look at acres of trees struggling under bindweed and canary grass.
But hope renews! We took a forestry course through our extension service, and attended small woodland events. It’s like group therapy, and very encouraging.
Then came 2020, and Climate Change became more than a theory.
The day the fires started, the skies became choked with smoke. They went from a sickly grey-yellow, to a frightening orange, then dark red, and finally black by mid afternoon. In the nursing home where I was working, a massive effort was made to evacuate most of the residents in a few hours, all of this while following COVID protocols.
After a summer that shattered heat records, September brought furious, hot winds from the West, literally a fire storm. Throughout most of the state and parts of Washington and California, the air was toxic, as over a million acres went up in the one of the most destructive fire seasons on record. For days, the skies were deep red or fully black, with ash falling like snow. We were required to evacuate from our home. When the skies finally cleared a week later, the damage from those hot, high winds and poisonous air was evident in broken, stressed trees.
Then January 2021 began with a freak windstorm that hit in the middle of the night with a crash, as the tallest trees on the farm came down in the space of a few minutes. It was something we’ve been told to expect as part of climate change: unpredictable microbursts. We mourned the loss of favorite giant trees.
February 2021 After the Ice Storm
But no sooner had we started to clean up from that, when the worst ice storm on record hit on Valentine’s weekend. I can’t describe the destruction. It was violent, and it went on for days. We lost hundreds of trees, and none were spared some kind of damage. Many were snapped in half. It took all of last year just to clear some of the piles of trees near our home. We could not bring ourselves to look closely at what happened in the woods.
Then 2021 gave us the “Heat Dome” in July.
Scorched Douglas Fir seedling, 2021
So in 2021 we gave ourselves a pass. I quit my day job, grew flowers.
And the trees have been recovering, along with us. This year we have taken up the mission with renewed purpose. We are re-planting with an eye to what will survive in a hotter, unpredictable future, introducing greater diversity for habitat, and with the hope that some will ease the transition into the woodland to come.