Masive blowdown & quick trail work. - McNeil

[Guy]

We hiked up to the McNeil Shelter yesterday. Just wanted to share some trail info and comment on the massive blow down areas from the September windstorm.

Either USFS or some other group waisted no time in getting in there and opening up the trail again. Hundreds of trees that were across the trail have been cut and moved. I don't think I can remember a time when so much damage was cleaned up so quickly. A big thanks to whoever was responsible.







The trail is clear of blowdown all the way to the Ridge Meadows. One area of blowdown after the Meadows remains.



There are some huge areas of 80-90% blowdown on the North sides of McGee & Yocum Ridges. It's hard to imagine what conditions must have been like to do this!


McGee Ridge


Yocum


Yocum

It was a wonderful if very cold and windy day on the mountain. 23F when we arrived at Top Spur, 28F when we left at 3:00pm. The wind on the final climb up to the Shelter was brutal. At times we had to stop and brace ourselves through the gusts! We didn't stay very long up there!

One final photo, A magical force greater than gravity is still protecting The McNeil Shelter & it's door lintel from collapse! It's made it through another year!


Other pics from the day:
https://guy.smugmug.com/Outdoors-Hikes- ... -20201025/

[retired jerry]

wow, those are some big trees, and a lot of them

yeah, thanks to whoever did that

[Chip Down]

A TR from Guy! Welcome back.

[wnshall]

Thanks for the trail update. I hiked up McGee creek trail to McNeil and was also surprised how much trail clearing had been done. It's really fantastic.

I think those large blowdown patches on McGee creek were areas of diseased trees. Photos I have from earlier trips in the past couple of years show some rather large patches of brown in about those areas.

BTW, the Timberline trail up to McNeil passes right by one of those patches and it's really impressive -- it almost looks like a clearcut.

[retired jerry]

was it burned?

like, in the Dollar Lake fire?

I don't think that made it's way over that far though

[OregonSurveyor]

We thought about the Dollar Lake fire too, but carefully compared old and new satellite photos and that fire didn’t get that far south.
There might have been disease in that area, but the satellite photos from the weeks before the fire show a natural green color that blends in evenly with the surrounding undamaged forest.
So a bit of a mystery to me.

[retired jerry]

yeah, that's what I remember, didn't get that far west

maybe at a lower elevation it got further west

[wnshall]

I was misremembering the location of the diseased-looking trees. Here's a photo from Oct 2017 from McNeil Pt.

Zoom in and you can see browned trees around the edges of the open meadow, but not in the two locations of the blow down, which is on the North-East slope of the ridge. That area looks perfectly green and healthy. So I guess the wind was REALLY strong in those small little areas!

[Webfoot]

That blow-down is amazing, and terrifying! Thanks for documenting it.

[Kay Burton]

We thought about the Dollar Lake fire too, but carefully compared old and new satellite photos and that fire didn’t get that far south.
There might have been disease in that area, but the satellite photos from the weeks before the fire show a natural green color that blends in evenly with the surrounding undamaged forest.
So a bit of a mystery to me.

The question is why our weather services do not track places with a large number of sunny days and prolonged droughts to predict possible fires. It seems to me, if you start tracking this pattern, organize the irrigation process to prevent fires. This will cost clearly less than putting out fires and reforestation. I came across an interesting article "Using Satellite Technology to Monitor Climate Change". It seems to me that if the states take care of studying this issue and introducing such a monitoring system, we will be able to reduce the number of forest fires and preserve the ecosystem.