Angeles National Forest Clean-Up “Lacks Aesthetic Appeal”

These plants are tough — they have to be to live up here — but the cutter just chews them up(Photo – Reg Green)

If you plan to hike the Mt. Lukens fire road from the fire station on the Angeles Crest Highway prepare yourself for a shock: for miles the vegetation on both sides of the road has been hacked at so violently that it looks as if it has been attacked by a ferocious animal.

By Reg Green

Shrubs, fresh young trees and the branches of old trees have been mangled by something of enormous strength. The cuts are not the clean incisions you make when you clean up the yard. Instead they look as if they have been gnawed at in a fit of rage. The white centers of tree branches are exposed like a deep wound.

A mile from the trailhead I came across the instrument that had chopped them down to size, a massive cutter that would overawe any likely resistance.

I contacted the Angeles National Forest, whose spokesman wrote:

While the reduction of roadside brush may lack aesthetic appeal it is more than made up for by the increase in defensible space along key fire roads…… With 95-percent of wildfires being human caused, and unprecedented numbers of visitors to the Forest, it is more important than ever that we prepare for a wildfire emergency. Well-maintained fire roads are a proven and essential component of the Forest’s larger strategy for reducing the rapid spread of a wildfire.

I don’t think I need add that it would be criminal to expose the firefighters in this unforgiving terrain to any unnecessary danger. It is also clear to me that this is a far more efficient way of clearing brush than squads of men with power tools fighting their way through the undergrowth –just as those tools wiped out wooden-handed axes. At this place above all others — the epicenter of the Station Fire that in 2009  destroyed five hundred square miles — how can anyone doubt the importance of caution?

A close-up shows why the machine makes short work of any vegetation it comes across (Photo – Reg Green)

Let’s hope it will be effective, even though I’ve seen places all over the forest where fire, fanned by fierce winds, has stepped over firebreaks with an ease amounting to disdain. Let’s hope too the authorities really are making a genuine effort and not simply window-dressing, like the way they shut even the most remote trails in response to the coronavirus. That, as we all know, was just for show.

In time, of course, Mother Nature and Father Time will soften the mess and new life will start up in profusion. But it is still depressing to see that tortured vegetation. Couldn’t they have found a less ugly way to achieve their goal? Perhaps not, but stewards of these natural resources who think of desecration on this scale merely as something “lacking aesthetic appeal’ may not have tried very hard.