Written by Joseph Cofresi, Wild Stew Field Crew Member.
Here at Wild Arizona’s Wild Stew Field Crew, we spend a lot of our time working in designated Wilderness areas. Within these areas, the use of mechanized equipment is prohibited, so we get the job done using human powered tools: crosscut saws, pruning saws, axes, loppers, and various digging tools. On top of that, we pack in all our gear and tools on foot. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am in no way complaining—I love the work. It’s just that this time wasn’t like that at all, this time it was different…
This hitch, we worked along the border of Arizona and New Mexico along Dry Blue Creek in partnership with the Gila National Forest on the first phase of a project to restore meadow habitat and improve stream health and structure along the Dry Blue. We’re starting with meadow restoration by thinning and removing pine and juniper species up to a certain size within the canyon canyon bottom. This area is outside any designated Wilderness areas, so we traded in our crosscut saws for chainsaws.
Thinning undergrowth and smaller diameter trees reduces the risk of intense fire and erosion that can add sediment to streams, impacting water quality. Restoring meadows to be more meadow-like benefits streams by reducing the amount of water taken up by plants and smaller trees. Snow that falls in meadows lasts longer and yields more liquid water than snow that falls in forest. One goal of this restoration project is to restore flow to the Dry Blue creek, flows that will have colder temperatures, yielding better habitat for native fish and aquatic animals.
After a long drive and a decent climb in elevation from Tucson, we arrived at nearby Mother Hubbard Canyon, where we would be camping out for the next eight days. After a very detailed run down and review of chainsaw operation and safety, as well as a refresher of felling and bucking safety, we were off to the races. Our itchy trigger fingers and barren beaver bellies began to satiate once we were able to dig our teeth into our first couple trees. We were hooked.
We worked in teams of two with a sawyer and a swamper trading off back and forth throughout each day. The sawyer operated the saw and chose the trees to fell while the swamper provided moral and physical support, assisting in the sawyers’ cut plan and moving cut material, or slash, out of the floodplain and lower terraces of the meadow. We implemented a lop-and-scatter technique to distribute the slash across the higher terraces and slope to reduce the risk of ladder fuels and encourage low severity, low intensity ground level burns when and if fire decides to roll through. It was satisfying to safely slice the smaller sized pines and junipers ’cause we would make a lot of progress rapidly, but it was just as satisfying to size up the more substantial trees too as we worked our way through leaving large individuals and clearing out the more densely packed together trees.
These eight days were an awesome opportunity for us to hone our chainsaw skills and get methodical with the larger trees and more complex cuts. It was also an awesome opportunity to learn more about the downsides of chainsaws. The felling of trees and bucking of logs is all good and fun until the chainsaw—this machine with so many components—stops functioning properly. This is when the troubleshooting begins, and just because you can diagnose the issue as to why the saw is not working, that does not guarantee you will be able to fix it in the field. We started off with five functioning saws and after eight days we finished with just three. This was at no fault to the users, and this is why we bring extra backup saws whenever possible.
This hitch was just the beginning of a much larger project, and we’ll be back next hitch with our saws (and ourselves) repaired and refreshed and ready to keep working on this meadow and habitat restoration project. All of us at Wild Arizona are looking forward to our continued involvement in the restoration of beautiful Dry Blue Creek!
