{"id":1510,"date":"2013-06-25T08:45:00","date_gmt":"2013-06-25T14:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/invertedsky.net\/?p=1510"},"modified":"2013-06-25T08:56:33","modified_gmt":"2013-06-25T14:56:33","slug":"logging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/invertedsky.net\/?p=1510","title":{"rendered":"Logging"},"content":{"rendered":"

I visited the West Mag area on my bike to view the results of the year-long logging project there.<\/p>\n

Overall, I’m not unhappy with what has been done.\u00a0 What makes me unhappy is all of the lies and bullshit justification for the project to begin with.\u00a0 A lot of it were claims about pine beetles.\u00a0 What’s left is worse than what pine beetles could have ever done.\u00a0 Yeah, if you take away the forest, you won’t have a pine beetle problem.\u00a0 That’s like tearing out a lawn because it has some weeds in it.\u00a0 Don’t even get me started on fire mitigation.\u00a0 The area is just a flammable in 40 MPH winds as it ever was.<\/p>\n

Seventy percent of the trees removed here were alive and healthy.\u00a0 Granted, the forest was mature and dense due to lack of fires.<\/p>\n

A big question I have is, since the land is publicly owned by us, why can’t some of the wood be used by the public?\u00a0 A huge number of homes here in the mountains are heated by wood.\u00a0 Everything the government does benefits a private contractor.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Looking<\/a>

Looking towards The Divide from forest road 355. (click for much larger, then click again and use the scroll bar.)<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I know this area really well. The landscape is now unfamiliar where the trees have been removed.\u00a0 The points of reference my brain had are now gone.\u00a0 Even though the road in the above photo is the exact same road that I’ve traveled a hundred times, it seemed I’d had never been on it before.\u00a0 Every once in a while, I’d catch something familiar to connect then and now.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Large<\/a>

Large slash piles waiting to be burned.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I’m sure that sooner or later, someone is going to come along and torch one of these piles.\u00a0 They are sitting there like bonfires in the waiting.\u00a0 From what I’ve read, there is no plan yet in place to do anything with them.<\/p>\n

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for some vegetation to re-grow in the cut areas.\u00a0 While there is a little grass in the foreground of the photo above, most places are totally void of any living plant.<\/p>\n

The project isn’t finished yet.\u00a0 It will gradually move southward into Gilpin County.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I visited the West Mag area on my bike to view the results of the year-long logging project there. Overall, I’m not unhappy with what has been done.\u00a0 What makes me unhappy is all of the lies and bullshit justification … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,18,57],"tags":[169,123,16],"class_list":["post-1510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-observations","category-photography","category-politics","tag-fire","tag-pine-beetles","tag-west-mag"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/invertedsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/invertedsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/invertedsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invertedsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invertedsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1510"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/invertedsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1516,"href":"https:\/\/invertedsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1510\/revisions\/1516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/invertedsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invertedsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invertedsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}