On a whim, I pulled off Herrin Lakes Road just up the hill from its turnoff and ran where the heavy logging activity was going on a month or so ago.

It was startling the morning in early February when I ran into half a dozen logging trucks, some loaded, some preparing to head up this road south of Herrin Lakes Road and west of Stemple Pass Road. They were parked around the intersection, plotting their day. The road up to where they were logging was really torn up, and it was still that way today. In fact, if it hadn't been frozen (28 degrees) this morning, parts of it would have been a quagmire.


Tall man says hello from a newly created clearing that now is home to three massive slash piles, one of which lies straight ahead.

They were in here less than a week, but they logged the hell out of it — "selective" cut (as opposed to a clearcut), but boy did it change the character of the area. it was a place of fairly densely growing ponderosas like these:


These two bruisers, one live and one dead, stood isolated near the trail I was following.

Also following the trail were wolves, sometime in the previous few hours (fresh snow). I'm no tracker, but I made out at least five sets of tracks and I followed them out into the open meadow where the top photo above was taken. You can see them in that top picture. The wolves went straight on out into the meadow, while I turned left at the gate and followed the fenceline a ways.

I saw several bunches of whitetails, but no elk and no wolves.

As you can see from the pictures, it was a beautiful morning.


This is the area that used to be a nice, park-like P-pine forest. We'll see how it looks later this spring without snow. I counted six big slash piles like the one in the tall-man picture.


This was taken last July in more or less the same area as the previous picture. The big curved tree featured here is gone, as are about 80 percent of the rest of the forest.

I skipped Easter for no particular reason, though I did work during the day on my water-coloring "talent."

5; 5; 91; 135