Los Padres National Forest officials have temporarily closed the Rockfront Off-Highway Vehicle (OHV) area to visitors and Forest Service employees due to dying trees that pose safety hazards.
Forest Service Public Affairs Officer Andrew Madsen said dead standing trees become unstable in windy weather, threatening sudden collapse on campgrounds or across trails.
“In the interest of safety, in some of those areas where we have a higher concentration of dead standing trees, we’re going ahead and closing them until we can send out crews of sawyers to saw them to take them down so they don’t suddenly fall on a visitor,” Madsen said.
The primary cause for these tree deaths is the extended drought, he said. When trees don’t get the precipitation they’re used to, they become more susceptible to disease and insect infestation.
For example, bark beetles—a normal part of a healthy forest ecosystem—are damaging trees in Los Padres because the drought has left the forest’s trees so fragile.
“What you’re seeing is the bark beetle in many cases going through and impacting younger trees that in the past would have been able to withstand that infestation,” Madsen said.
The Forest Service doesn’t have a precise timeline for the temporary closures, but Madsen said scheduling will be tough heading into fire season. Many of the service’s wildland firefighters are tied up mitigating fires in the forest, and once they’re available, they’ll be responsible for cutting down the hazardous trees.
“We’re hoping as soon as we can get our crews in there to do some work and get some of these trees cut down essentially, remove the hazard, then we would immediately go to reopen these areas,” Madsen said.
Closed areas include: Baja, Buck Springs, and Paradise campgrounds; the Rockfront OHV Area; and the Upper 35 Canyon, Paradise, Branch Creek, Big Rocks, Jack Springs, Twin Rocks, Shaw Ridge, Logan Ridge, and Los Machos trails.
This article appears in Jun 9-16, 2016.