101 Marking Trees the Easy Way

Riding in a copter is kind of a neat experience and it wasn’t long after I started working with Les McMullen that the opportunity came my way. The research that Les was doing required that any bark beetle infestations within a certain distance to our study had to be eliminated. Copters were used, because ground surveillance for these spot infestations was time consuming and uncertain.

This particular morning we took off in a Bell Jet Ranger and in about fifteen minutes were at the jobsite. The ride to the site was fun and exciting, and to make the job easier when we got to the work site, Les had asked the pilot to take the doors off. Because of the rounded shape of the Bell’s body you were in fact partly sitting over nothing and could easily look down on the tops of the pine trees below.

This was kind of cool but only for a very few minutes as the pilot in following Les’ directions kept circling back and forth and you felt like a tether ball at the end of a rope. This however made it easy for Les in the meantime to fling rolls of adding machine tape out of the open doorway onto the infected pine trees for locating later by foot.

When I stated this was cool for a few minute I really meant seconds as the motion immediately overwhelmed my senses and I became as sick as a dog, maybe even sicker, if that were possible. I thought I was going to toss my cookies any second, but mercifully we were finished with that part of the operation and my head stopped spinning as we soon headed back to the airport.



You can’t believe how glad I was to climb out of the copter and wobble over to the pickup for the drive to the plot.