Continuing on the notion of special interest trips for natural history-
One of the neatest tours I evr took was a survey of fire ecology in the
San Gabriel/Santa Monica Mountains. Every one pile on a bus that went to
chapparal burns at various stages of regrowth. We began at a 1 year old
burn, then a 3, 5, 10, etc. up to a site that had not been burned in the
past 100+ years. This reinforced the dramatic nature of the plant
differences at various fire successional stages. The trip leaders knew
their plants and had done some good research on teh burn history.

I would love to do something like that in local forests, but it seems
like distance and current forest management practices would make that
more difficult. It is pretty easy to do this for various stages of ckear
cuts followed by herbicides and a planted monoculture, but somehow its
just not as appealing.

Jim Neitzel
The Evergreen State College
neitzelj at elwha.evergreen.edu