OT-Hawaii wildfires
- Thread starter HBK4life_rivals100467
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I'm pretty sure the wineries weren't part of the native ecosystem. And I'm pretty sure The Nature Conservancy knows a whole lot more about ecosystems than a bunch of winery owners. Very hard to restore native ecosystems after 100+ years of mismanagement or no-management. Now add invasive species. Way more complex than most people can understand.
No but a woman I knew in Napa lost her home and vineyard. It didn’t need to happen. What some people fail to realize is that nature can involve massive loss of flora and fauna. You put the fires out for decades without reducing the biomass and then all of a sudden you can’t put the fire out.
So let the shrubs grow unchecked and then let fire destroy the vineyards, wineries and homes. Makes a lot of sense. How much CO2 was released in those fires? It’s an illogical approach to environmental management.
I rarely agree with Top Gun, but this is undeniably true.
Hawaii is all it is said to be regardless the tourists
Center of the Pacific Ocean.
Called, “The Meeting Place”.
Guessing Dingle has never been close.
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I have not. Europe several times. Lots of my fam have been to Hawaii. I’m more of. Grand Tetons/RMNP/Glacier/mountain wilderness and whitewater rafting kind of guy.
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I climbed too.
I lived in Summit County for 2 years.
Glad you saw Europe, I have too.
Why do you always try to be better?
Try to be better? I haven’t lived in Summit County. Dreamed of it. LOVE the Collegiate Peaks area but I’ve only hiked a little in Summit County. Skied there several times
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Cool.
I have done lots too.
Climbed Longs Peak three different routes before I was 17.
I moved to Alaska as it was my wanderlust.
I have done lots too.
Climbed Longs Peak three different routes before I was 17.
I moved to Alaska as it was my wanderlust.
Colorado is where I moved from Lincoln.
CSU first
Summit County next.
I am fortunate I did not die in an avalanche.
Man when I can see mountains in my windshield I’m a happy camper. It’s been too long now. I had a trip planned with an old friend right before COVID to the Bighorns but unfortunately he got pneumonia. He had struggled with lung disease so we were going to take an ATV and go ride around the area we used to backpack. There’s a an old trail you can take to get to the top of a ridge that looks down on a chain of lakes that we used to hike to get to Bomber Mountain and Cloud Peak. You literally walk 10 yards across the wilderness boundary from that trail and you can see the whole route. Unfortunately his health deteriorated further and he died before we could take that trip.
Kauai is the place to go if you want to get that Hawaii vibe. Oahu has better beaches but a lot more people.
Dingle, I'll apologize in advance for making you envious -- I'm heading out to the Cody area next week
Longs Peak 3x is no joke
**** Longs Peak one time is no joke
The keyhole is quite something
Cody is a cool town. I like Buffalo more but Cody’s proximity to Yellowstone is great.
Not all environmental groups have the same goals. So not everyone places a priority on carbon sequestration.
My point was wineries calling out someone for trying to restore land back to its native state is kind of odd. People living in high risk fire areas is part of the problem. I would argue all those houses are the reason people can't do proper vegetative management like controlled burns.
Yeah that is one of the fascinating things about the Hawaiian islands. The NE coast of the islands get virtually all the moisture and are extremely lush. The SW coasts (which includes Lahaina) are virtually deserts. The most extreme example of this is Kauai which has the wettest spot on the planet with over 400 inches, while the SW coast gets 3 inches of rain a year.
The cause has a lot less to do with the drought and climate change BS and more to do with a changing landscape after the pineapple and sugarcane plantations closed down. Those fields turned into dry brush which is always a tinderbox in late summer.
Lahaina was my favorite town in Maui (although it had changed too much in the last two decades with too many Tommy Bahama and other ritsy stores. When I was there as a kid it was a genuine Hawaiian coastal town.
Exactly. This was a preventable tragedy. Unmanaged fields of grass and dry brsh are a wildfire waiting to happen. They are usally the places where bigger forest fires get ingited as well all across the west. In Colorado an unmanaged grass field turned into an inferno that burned down a neighborhood and killed a lot of people as well.
For me, the climate change excuse is just a cop out for neglecting to take care of the landscape. And it is unfortunate the Hawaii completely abandoned its agricultural past.
Yeah Kauai is one of my favorite places on Earth. Unfortunately it is starting to change and become more touristy.
The family wants to go to Europe next year. I'm not really feeling into it. I like the natural world in all it's varied grandeur (mountains, rainforests, beaches, glaciers, wildlife, etc). I hate crowds of dumb people. We went on a Carnival cruise with a stop at Disney in March and I didn't enjoy it. Only thing I really liked was a stop in the DR.
What kind of vegetation was on the island 300 years ago before the fields were cleared for pineapple and sugar cane?
I understand that and that is somewhat true. You don’t necessarily have to do burns to control some of the vegetation. You can graze it with goats for instance. That’s getting to be a thing in places and would do wonders for some of the nature conservancy acres in wine country. Natural does not always equal good though.
I was on Niihau once. And yes, I'm a Haole. I embarked a SH 60 helicopter on a Navy cruiser. The ship was way distant from Kauai and working with the Navy Range at Kauai, Barking Sands. For some reason on the way to Pearl Harbor the helo landed on Niihau. It has been many years, but I recall we were on a helicopter pad inside a fenced area and there were a couple people who looked local who came out of a steel building and yuked it up with the pilots. It wasn't a fuel stop. The crew chief told us it would be about 15 minutes and we were not to step out of the helicopter. After awhile the pilots fired the helo up and we took off. The island looked dry, barren, and had red soil
Reading further on Lahaina, some of the problem apparently was a large number of dead diseased Eucalyptus trees in addition to a an overgrowth of dry invasive grasses. There are also large tracts of agricultural land on the island that has been purchased by wealthy folks and celebrities including Oprah.
In Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming that usually leads to under grazed land that are a wildfire waiting to happen. Maui has lots of agricultural land devoted to vegetable production and some livestock.
Sad situation out there and anybody who was a little slow to leave had their path blocked. Lots of people died in their cars
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I believe that vegetation is extinct. That's a good question though. It wasn't coconut palms.
Yeah I know that in Colorado where I live now and in California where I lived previously it is the dry grass lands that almost always spark the big fires that eventually cause massive damage. This land is easy to manage with a large lawnmower tractor or even grazing animals.Reading further on Lahaina, some of the problem apparently was a large number of dead diseased Eucalyptus trees in addition to a an overgrowth of dry invasive grasses. There are also large tracts of agricultural land on the island that has been purchased by wealthy folks and celebrities including Oprah.
In Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming that usually leads to under grazed land that are a wildfire waiting to happen. Maui has lots of agricultural land devoted to vegetable production and some livestock.
Sad situation out there and anybody who was a little slow to leave had their path blocked. Lots of people died in their cars
Lahaina was a special place on Maui and I remember going to it as a 13-year-old kid then going as a family in 2007. We were even going to go in 2020 before the covid closures. It will never be the same.
There was an article the WSJ reprinted that warned of this happening over a decade ago. I’ve read that people were encouraged to convert roofs to non combustible materials but little had been done. Much of this damage sounds like it could have been prevented with fuel management and building retrofits. The drone footage is showing intact homes surrounded by completely destroyed structures. I get that people wanted to preserve historical appearances but….
Hey Spectrum,
I'm interested as I have a long love affair with Longs Peak. I've summitted Longs 5 times, the first when I was 14 wearing Keds along with my father, the last time 48 years later with my daughter.
Which routes did you do? I want to do it one more time but my knees are in pretty bad shape (3 knee surgeries from a life of jockdom so not a lot of cartilage left). I even had to give up skiing because the knees wouldn't handle a day of bumps and skiing groomed runs is too boring.
I'm not a peak bagger. I avoid most 14'ers due to the crowds unless I can summit by an unusual non-technical route. One of my most favorite summits in Colorado is uncrowded. There are seven lakes on the way and I'm usually alone after the third one. Why is it uncrowded? It's 'only' 13,950 and does involve some rock scrambling that is probably class 4. The highest I've ever been is a hair under 5000m (Mt. Kenya). Oxygen gets pretty scarce at that altitude. It was weird camping below the summit in a sleeping bag with 7 layers of clothing freezing my tail off while knowing I was only about a degree from the equator. Sunrise from the summit was awesome though.
The three I did before 17 were:
Standard
North Face, old cable route
Notch Couloir
I too wore keds first trip!!
Did Meeker straight up from just below Chasm lake, but did not do the knife edge traverse as I was by myself. This was 3rd class the way I took.
I was quite a mountain rat as a kid.
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I enjoy an unabated view of Long’s all day every day on my back patio
You guys are pretty hardcore
You guys are pretty hardcore
I'm impressed! Longs is such an interesting mountain there is something for everyone on it. A little piece of trivia: as a 10 year old, I and my family were hiking up Twin Sisters. In those days there was a manned Fire Lookout at the top of the mountain. When we got there the ranger handed us binoculars so that we could see the climbers doing the first ascent of the Diamond, August 1960.