Peripatetic blogger Larry Kurtz has Black Hills dirt permanently under his fingernails. He offers a remarkable account of the 2002 Grizzly Gulch fire, which he watched from the north side of Deadwood as the town faced imminent destruction from flames rising 800 feet. Only a switch in the wind saved Deadwood and perhaps, says Kurtz, Whitewood and Sturgis.

Also remarkable, says Kurtz, is the resiliency of the ecosystem. What we see as disaster, nature treats as healthy renewal:

Using my cell phone I gave live updates to Jack Daniels at the head-banger radio station. His home was just one of hundreds threatened by the blaze. His family returned to a near-miss now a place where oak is returning to those canyons at the foot of Pillar Peak.

In two hours during the following Spring I picked over 200 pounds of morels which carpeted the skidder trails. A hard rain made another 1000 pounds unusable.

Ten years later aspen is exploding into the hills where pine once infested these draws and buttes [Larry Kurtz, “Deadwood Not Dead Nearly Ten Years After Grizzly Gulch,” interested party, 2012.05.08.

Lawrence County Commission candidate Robert Romanov drew some skeptical hissing and clucking from audience members at a Spearfish public forum last week when he suggested that one response to the pine beetle infestation is to plant different trees. He also recognized the forest’s ability to come back from fire.

I look with dismay on those reddish-brown beetle patches on Spearfish Peak, not to mention the wide-ranging beetle devastation further south in the Hills. But whether those trees come down by beetle, blaze, or chainsaw, we should keep in mind the long view. Nature used to clear out patches of the Hills with fires like the Grizzly Gulch blaze all the time. And as Kurtz shows us around Deadwood, those fires clear the way for new life and healthier Hills.

I was out today:

Tinton Trail, south of Spearfish, South Dakota

Correct me if I’m mistaken, Mr. Kurtz, but the Tinton Trail south from Spearfish is why the gear gods invented mountain bikes. Beautiful forest, fun dipsy doodles, some tricky rocks… awesome!

Big Hill Trail Loop D, Black Hills, south of Spearfish, South Dakota

The trail (and a couple wrong turns!) eventually led me to the wonderful Big Hill Trails. After an hour on the Tinton Trail weaving, hopping, and convincing myself that, yes, I can make it up that slope and over those rocks (mountain biking is two parts mental, one part granola bars), I popped over the Big Hill trailhead and found wide grassy paths whispering to me, “Go ahead. Gear up. Fly.”

The Dakota Five-O mountain bike race starts at the Spearfish City Park, sends riders up Tinton Road, then takes them down these two trails. Riders then go another thirty-some miles through the woods before racing back to the finish line in Spearfish. I’d go ride with them in the 12th annual race on Labor Day, but (1) I’m not sure my old GT triple triangle and I could make the whole loop before dark, and (2) all 600 entry slots filled up on the first day of registration (at $70 a pop!).

I’ll be finishing the Five-O privately, over several Sundays, one section at a time… with time to stop and take pictures. Aahhh….

Dakota War College offers another lesson in logical fallacies, this time in the classic false dilemma. The fake-named GOP establishment blog contends that Senator Tim Johnson’s hesitance to endorse legislation proposed by Senator John Thune and Rep. Kristi Noem to combat pine beetle infestations means that the senior senator wants the Black Hills to burn down.

This false dilemma resembles the GOP-flackery floated by flailing proponents of Governor Daugaard’s HB 1234 who say that if you don’t back their preferred legislation, you must back a failing status quo. On education policy and on pine beetle policy, Republicans ignore the logical possibility of recognizing the need for action while still recognizing the need to weigh the pros and cons of any one proposal against other proposals.

Read the text of Senator Thune’s National Forest Emergency Response Act (S. 2277—Rep Noem’s H.R. 4331 is identical), and you’ll see why any reader might hesitate to immediately jump on board. For one thing, the bill doesn’t just address pine beetle infestations; it opens up forests affected by “pine beetle infestation, drought, disease, or storm damage” to emergency declarations. The bill exempts “any remedial action or… timber sale” performed under the emergency rules from any “restraining order, preliminary injunction, or injunction pending appeal,” a seemingly remarkable removal of checks on executive power.

My Republican friends like to rib us Dems over Rahm Emanuel’s oft-cited advice about not letting a crisis go to waste. But the content of S. 2277 suggests that Senator Thune and Rep. Noem are following that advice exactly and trying to do much more than simply addressing the pine beetle problem at hand.

The proposed deregulations are also filled with the unannotated cross-references to existing statute that justify Senator Johnson and any other responsible reader’s saying, “Hold on: before I say I’ll vote for this bill, I need to read all the other laws it cites and changes and make sure I’m not missing some trick.”

Larry Kurtz pointed me toward the bill text; he’s already sure Thune and Noem are more worried about boosting Big Timber, not engaging in effective pine beetle management. Kurtz, who knows more about the forest than DWC, me, and all of our commenters combined, blasts the GOP approach and proposes the following solution:

Beetle-killed Ponderosa pine is substantially lighter than green timber, for one thing. That the youngest trees need to go is number two. Logging companieswant the legacy trees that need to stay: number three. The Forest Service is broken: four.

It’s not a beetle problem or even a money problem: it’s a water problem. Preserve the legacy pine, select cut everything else, convert it to fuel, and burn to encourage aspen to begin the process of healing the living water/rock that is the Black Hills [Larry Kurtz, "Earth Haters Won't Fix the Black Hills," interested party, 2012.04.13].

By Republican logic, I should be able to demand that Senator Johnson endorse Kurtz’s approach or stand guilty of advocating fiery death for all of us living things in and around the Black Hills. (Wow: this talk of fiery death sounds like the debate over building a new gym in Madison last year!) But logically, Senator Johnson reserves the right to read all proposals thoroughly, measure advantages and disadvantages, and cast an informed vote.

*   *   *
p.s. on piddling around: If we really are in a pine beetle emergency, Senator Thune and Rep. Noem aren’t really acting like it. Instead of pushing for immediate, focused action, Thune and Noem are planning to tuck their pine beetle legislation away in the Farm Bill, which may take a while to formulate and which will mask debate on the specifics of this proposal. If pine beetles are an urgent problem, and if Thune and Noem have a good solution, they should be able to propose it now and push it through Congress on its own merits.

Sometimes a blogger needs to get away from it all. Here’s how I did that this afternoon, just a couple miles west of Spearfish:

view southwest across Higgins Gulch toward Crow Peak

view northwest across Higgins Gulch

view north from Johnson Fire Road, toward Higgins Gulch Road

I’m never lost… just sometimes hard to find.

Wrap your head around this one: an environmentalist could go to jail for trying to trick loggers into cutting down more trees:

A Black Hills environmentalist who for years has fought U.S. Forest Service timber-cutting projects is facing federal charges for changing marks on trees in a timber sale near his home so that more trees would be cut.

Brian Brademeyer, who lives on a small private acreage inside the Norbeck Wildlife Preserve southeast of Hill City, faces up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for the misdemeanor citation served on Jan. 31. He is scheduled to appear before U.S. Magistrate Judge Veronica Duffy on March 15 in Rapid City.

Brademeyer admitted that he painted over marks on more than 20 pine trees on Forest Service land across the fence from his home in the summer of 2010. A Forest Service crew had marked the trees with orange paint so they would not be cut by a planned timber project. Brademeyer painted over the orange with black paint, hoping they would be cut as part of the Palmer Gulch timber sale. Despite that, he continues to oppose the Palmer Gulch sale, which is part of a larger forest management project in the Norbeck [Kevin Woster, "Noted Environmentalist Ticketed for Timber Sale Violation," Rapid City Journal, 2012.02.18].

From tree-hugger to tree-mugger?

My friend Larry Kurtz will likely say Brademeyer didn’t go far enough. The pine beetles are enjoying a smorgasbord here in the Black Hills due to decades of fire suppression. If we don’t want pine beetles, we need to get rid of a whole lot of pines. One way or the other, by beetle, logging, or fire, nature is trying to restore the ecological balance that our subdivisions have subverted.

HB 1098 won’t stop Canadian company Powertech from mining for uranium in the southern Black Hills; it only restores the state’s authority to regulate such environmentally hazardous activities.

Watch “We Are the Land: Uranium Mining in the Black Hills,” a mini-documentary by Christopher Crosby, and you may ask HB 1098′s sponsors to add some amendments to stop Powertech altogether.

Dayton O. Hyde of the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary doesn’t look like some extremist tree hugger. He just doesn’t want his horses drinking poison water. “Once that water’s gone,” says Hyde, “there’s no way you can clean those aquifers…. The money will go to Canada, the uranium will go to China….” Hmm… sound familiar?

Rep. Patricia Stricherz (R-8/Winfred) is contending for the title of My Favorite Republican in this year’s Legislative session… which I suspect means she’ll get more cold shoulder from her fellow District 8 Republican Russell Olson.

Rep. Stricherz is already poking the Republican bear with the suggestion that she will introduce legislation to bring South Dakota into compliance with the Indian Child Welfare Act, a sore spot for state government after NPR’s investigation of our foster care system last October.

Now Rep. Stricherz leads a motley bipartisan crew in filing HB 1098, which would repeal a law passed last session that eliminated state-level oversight of in situ leach mining for uranium. The bill was essentially a gift to southern Black Hills uranium miner Mark Hollenbeck and Powertech, the Canadian company he fronts in South Dakota, from Rep. Lance Russell (R-20/Hot Springs), who masquerades as an environmental lawyer but who helped his mother finagle land with Powertech uranium leases prior to his spsonsorship of this legislation.

Stricherz opposed this risky, cronyist deregulation last year. With Powertech’s stock declining both literally and figuratively, Rep. Stricherz may find it easier to beat the miners who would pollute our Black Hills and the Cheyenne River watershed.

If her Republican colleagues find regulating uranium hard to swallow, Rep. Stricherz should remind them that HB 1098 is really a states’ rights bill. Rep. Russell took oversight away from South Dakota and put it entirely in the hands of federal regulators. Rep. Stricherz would return decision-making power to the state of South Dakota. Go, Patty!

On the long-standing pine beetle problem in the Black Hills, Rep. Kristi Noem has sounded a lot like Newt Gingrich’s assessment of the Occupy activists who’ve been harassing him in Iowa: “All noise, no thought.”

The U.S. Forest Service and Lawrence County officials aren’t waiting for Rep. Noem to take real action. On Tuesday, the Lawrence County Commission approved an unprecedented agreement under which the Forest Service will allow the county to thin trees for pine beetle control:

Under the agreement, the county will identify green-hit infested trees, then hire subcontractors to treat them with the “cut and chunk” method, where a tree is cut down, de-limbed and cut into two-foot lengths that quickly dry out, killing the beetles under the bark.

Treated trees will not be allowed to leave Forest Service land, and both the county and the Forest Service will regulate where trees are cut, how many and what sizes.

Commissioners stressed the gravity of the agreement at the commissioner’s regular meeting Tuesday. The Forest Service has never made such an agreement with any other county in the nation — meaning that Lawrence County has an unprecedented opportunity to stem the rapidly flowing tide of the beetles, which threatens many aspects of the area’s economy in terms of tourism, housing and the timber industry [Mark VanGerpen, "Unprecedented Pine Beetle Agreement Signed," Black Hills Pioneer, 2011.12.28].

Local industry and residents are chomping at the bit to participate. Nieman Timber is ready to spend $50K; the Spearfish Canyon Foundation has pledged $125,000 and is taking more donations.