Posted by David Sherman on Wednesday, October 26, 2005 at 10:16PM :
In Reply to: Re: Those are larches posted by Ken Dunnington on Wednesday, October 26, 2005 at 6:50PM :
Yes, we have lots of them everywhere there's lodgepole pines, but the fact is lodgepole forests normally burn every 20-30 years. People have suppressed the fires, which lets the pines get old enough to get infested with beetles. Lodgepole pines are designed to burn. They exude pitch all over, especially whent hey get old, and they keep their dry branches on all the way to the ground. Most of what burned up in the big fires in Yellowstone were lodgepoles. Congressmen and other ignorant people got all worked up about the forests being "destroyed", but a fire in a lodgepole pine forest is more like a grass fire in the prairie as far as the ecology goes. It's not at all like a fire in old growth timber like the Tillamook burn, the Yacolt burn, or even the 1910 fire in N. Idaho.
I have a few lodgepoles on my place, and they're mostly dying and getting replaced by longer-lived trees. If I can get to them, I try to cut them as soon as they die to use for building poles, since they're always the best poles.
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