Backcountry Musings

Job Posting
https://www.idahotrailsassociation.org/2020/06/ita-seeking-executive-director/

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Treasure Valley has posted a great report on their delayed National Trails day project on their Facebook page. Check it out!

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Female Urinary Devices, also known as FUDs, or pee funnels, can really save the day. These items are a well-kept secret of female campers because they let you go #1 without having to drop your pants completely. Without these devices that let you pee standing up, women have to wander very far away from camp to get the privacy they need. With an FUD., since you can actually “go” while standing up, you experience the same “go anywhere” convenience that men enjoy.
TB Video        Review of 10 FUD products

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Special Report
Going Outdoors or Staying Inside
May 2020

Many people are turning to the outdoors to cope with the stress and concerns of the Corona Virus Pandemic. Volunteer groups may also be considering offering outdoor activities to the public to address this public use. But is this a good idea? Not really. Here is the rationale for why we need to encourage everyone to stay home and stay local.

Short Term Issues
The immediate effort nationwide is to prevent the spread of the Corona virus. This is being accomplished by requesting, and in some states demanding, that people self-quarantine, maintain social distancing, and practice good hygiene practices. Non-essential businesses where large number of people congregate like restaurants, theaters, bars, and gyms have been closed. Sporting events of all types have been cancelled and venues closed. State and local parks, some National Forest recreation sites, and National Parks are being closed as well. These closures initially were intended to last 2-3 weeks but may extend for 4-6 weeks or longer depending on local infection rates.

For stewardship organizations this strategy has meant cancelling meetings, trainings, and outdoor events for the near term. Volunteer activities can be expected to be curtailed for several months. While generally access to dispersed areas like wilderness is open, some popular trailheads may be closed to prevent people from congregating.

There has also been mixed messaging about going to the outdoors to escape the virus and other people. While we extoll the virtues of getting outdoors, what has happened instead is even more people seeking out these opportunities creating large crowds in popular areas. It is important that people stay close to home, and enjoy nature in their backyards, their neighborhoods, or at least for the time being, virtually. Protecting the health of our communities and avoiding strains on the medical infrastructure, especially in our vunerable rural areas, are critical right now.

This article says it all:  High Country News:  https://www.hcn.org/articles/covid19-as-covid19-spreads-how-do-you-ethically-get-outdoors/

Here are Leave No Trace suggestions for getting outdoors:  https://lnt.org/the-leave-no-trace-recommendations-for-getting-outside-amidst-covid-19/

Here are suggestions from the Outdoor Alliance on getting outside during this crisis.

Stewardship Group Coping Strategies

Groups around the country are adapting to the crisis situation.  Here are some ideas for your organization.

• Review your plans for the year and postpone or reschedule events to June or later.
• Consider doing training online or with video conferencing software like Zoom of GoToMeeting.
• Consider adapting your recruiting from a national to a local area model. Impacts to travel and concerns over the spread of the virus will continue for months impacting broad recruitment area strategies.  Local recruitment may offer new opportunities for relationship building and capacity growth while providing needed employment stimulus locally.
• Check in with your agency partners to see what current policies are and what resources they might have available. The Park Service has created a webpage for Partners during this crisis at:  https://www.nps.gov/subjects/partnerships/publichealthforpartners.htm
• If you have existing agreements with agency partners, start discussing now how closures will affect recruiting and summer programs. Adjust your agreements as necessary.
• The current stand down may result in additional year end fund availability. Never too early to start discussing future projects and potential agreements with agency partners to put these funds to good use.

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READ MORE: Recreating Responsibly COVID-19

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Washington state is gearing up for a new challenge this year – fighting wildfires in the time of coronavirus.

Fire season is already here, too — 160 fires have sparked so far statewide, with 30% of them in the western part of the state. Thursday, Dept. of Natural Resources crews were fighting two of the largest fires burning near Arlington in Snohomish County, and Acme, in Whatcom County.
“It’s been challenging to fight fire, and to get people trained up this year,” said Jay Guthrie, asst. region manager for Forest Practice and Fire with the Washington Dept. of Natural Resources.
Spring training sessions have moved online, which makes it difficult to do the hands-on learning of firefighting. Prescribed burns were canceled. Crews are also trying to practice social distancing – keeping at least six feet apart while working in the field.
They do have one thing going for them already:
“Part of normal working safety is to keep 10 feet apart, so any swing of a tool is not within range of someone else,” said Guthrie.
State Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz said they’re currently working with the federal government to rewrite the playbook for wildfires during a pandemic.  READ MORE

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A vast region of the western United States, extending from California, Arizona and New Mexico north to Oregon and Idaho, is in the grips of the first climate change-induced megadrought observed in the past 1,200 years, a study shows. The finding means the phenomenon is no longer a threat for millions to worry about in the future, but is already here.

The megadrought has emerged while thirsty, expanding cities are on a collision course with the water demands of farmers and with environmental interests, posing nightmare scenarios for water managers in fast-growing states.

A megadrought is broadly defined as a severe drought that occurs across a broad region for a long duration, typically multiple decades.

Unlike historical megadroughts triggered by natural climate cycles, emissions of heat-trapping gases from human activities have contributed to the current one, the study finds. Warming temperatures and increasing evaporation, along with earlier spring snowmelt, have pushed the Southwest into its second-worst drought in more than a millennium of observations.

The study, published in the journal Science on Thursday, compares modern soil moisture data with historical records gleaned from tree rings, and finds that when compared with all droughts seen since the year 800 across western North America, the 19-year drought that began in 2000 and continued through 2018 (this drought is still ongoing, though the study’s data is analyzed through 2018) was worse than almost all other megadroughts in this region.

The researchers, who painstakingly reconstructed soil moisture records from 1,586 tree-ring chronologies to determine drought severity, found only one megadrought that occurred in the late 1500s was more intense.

Historical megadroughts, spanning vast regions and multiple decades, were triggered by natural fluctuations in tropical ocean conditions, such as La Niña, the cyclic cooling of waters in the tropical Pacific.

“The megadrought era seems to be reemerging, but for a different reason than the [past] megadroughts,” said Park Williams, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.

Although many areas in the West had a productive wet season in 2019 and some this year, “you can’t go anywhere in the West without having suffered drought on a millennial scale,” Williams said, noting that megadroughts contain relatively wet periods interspersed between parched years.

“I think the important lesson that comes out of this is that climate change is not a future problem,” said Benjamin I. Cook, a NASA climate scientist and co-author of the study. “Climate change is a problem today. The more we look, the more we find this event was worse because of climate change.”

The study is part scientific grunt work, involving sifting through drought records to find past instances of comparable conditions, and part sophisticated sleuthing that employs computer models to determine how climate change is altering the likelihood of an event like this one.

Cook said the researchers analyzed climate models for the region, which showed warming trends and changes in precipitation. They compared soil moisture with and without global warming-induced trends, “and we were able to determine that 30 to 50 percent of the current drought is attributable to climate change.”  READ MORE

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