Many years ago I was speaking to a forester who worked in the Boise National Forest. He was a bit frustrated with some of the policy decisions that were made by bureaucrats in regards to forest management. “The problem,” he said,”is that politics runs in two- and four- and six year cycles. A president who serves two full terms is only president for eight years. In the forest, however, the cycles are much bigger. The forest has cycles that last for hundreds and thousands of years, but nobody who is involved in politics can think in terms beyond a decade. So the policies change all of the time, while the forest continues to live at its own pace.

The challenge, of course, is different in the massive national forests of the west. Head up into British Columbia, the Yukon and Alaska and there are even larger tracts of forested land. Here in the Black Hills, our forest is smaller. The hills are a kind of an island in the midst of the prairie, separated from other ranges, such as the Big Horns to the west. That doesn’t mean that our forest has cycles that are any shorter than those of larger tracts of land, just that we can see the effects of those cycles a bit more clearly because we are surveying a smaller plot of land.

There is a kind of cycle in the hills that involves heavy forestation, beetle attacks and outbreaks and fire. Then that cycle repeats. And we find ourselves in the midst of the the beetle attacks, though there are some signs that the intensity of the present attack is lessening.

It is our instinct to fight back when the beetles attack. We don’t like the sight of thousands of dead and dying trees on the hills. We are afraid of the fire danger that accompanies acres of dry dead fuels. We can accept the reality of fire as a part of the forest life cycle, but we feel different when we are talking about our own back yards and the forest recreation sites where we go for rest and renewal.

The hills have a long history of human intervention and management. It isn’t, however, really long from the perspective of the forest.This summer will be only been 141 years since the 1874 Black Hills Expedition surveyed the hills, photographed its tree-covered landscape, and discovered gold that forever changed the face of the hills. We do have pictures from that expedition. We do know that the hills had a lot less trees in those days. What we can’t tell is if that kind of more lightly forested landscape is in our future. We don’t even know 150 years of the story of the place we live, and the forest has cycles that are likely much longer.

Of course those who study forests know more about the history of the landscape. They have studied evidence in long-lived standing trees, evidence in the soils and rocks and even archeological evidence in the fossil record. There is some sense that the number of trees has increased and decreased over the years.

Theories develop and those theories are tried out. In a sense the entire area of the hills is a kind of forest experiment. Thinning the forest makes it safer from rampant fires. Cutting and removing beetle-infested trees seems to help slow the spread of beetles. As a result of all of this activity, the forest is filled with slash piles that need to be cleared up. So far this winter, though a bit colder than some winters, has been too dry in much of the hills. There isn’t enough snow to burn the piles. And when we do get a bit of snow, like happened a couple of weeks ago, the weather can play tricks on the slash pile burning. An inversion traps cold air underneath warm air and the result is that the natural rising and falling of the air - and of smoke - doesn’t occur. If you are close to the inversion line when you light a fire in your fireplace, the smoke won’t travel up the chimney and the fire just smolders. The same thing occurs when a slash pile is lit. A week ago, the inversion was so widespread that slash piles would not burn. Then a day later the inversion flipped and even green piles would burn.

If we knew how to predict the inversions, we could plan our lives a bit better.

Of course all of this is quite theoretical for me personally. We have a very small place on the edge of the forest. Our own property doesn’t produce slash piles. When we do have to remove a tree, the branches can be loaded into my pickup and taken to the yard waste recycling pile at the city dump. I am more challenged by the need to nurture young trees in a dry climate so that we can at least replace the trees we have lost over the years of living here.

But when the inversion traps the smoke close to the ground, it is no fun to live or hike in the hills. When it is smoky in the winter when there is no large fire, it can be a bit depressing. Inversions, however, are part of the natural cycles of the hills as well. I suppose that long ago before there were any permanent residents in the hills large fires that were extinguished by the weather slowed when an inversion set in to the hills and allowed the weather to slow and eventually extinguish the fire.

The forest is constantly changing. Our lives are long enough to appreciate the changes, even though we don’t live long enough to see the larger cycles. So we watch the forest from our limited perspective and we do what we are able to contribute to the health of the forest.

It is a bit humbling, and therefore good, to recognize that we belong to something that is much bigger than the span of our own lives.

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