Volunteer Wildfire Mitigation

On Saturday morning, September 1, I volunteered with the Wildlands Restoration Volunteers (WRV) for a third time to help with a wildfire mitigation project.  This project is located on the Ben Delatour Boy Scout Ranch in the Roosevelt National Forest in north-central Colorado.  The WRV crew consists of experienced sawyers who fell small diameter (12 inches or smaller) ponderosa pines, and "swampers" like me who gather up the limbs, branches, and bucked-up trunks and place them in piles (which I like to call pyres) that will be burned when there is snow on the ground.  This is really strenuous work carried out on very steep slopes, so I'm exhausted when the day is over.

The image accompanying this post was taken at our staging area.  This area was subjected to a prescribed burn in 2017, and some of the trees behind the vehicles were damaged in the fire and may die.  The area where we were working on Saturday is visible in the background of the image on the steep, wooded hillside across the Elkhorn Creek valley.