GRIZZLY
FUTURE
LOGAN RETIRED from the Forest Service in 2006 and moved
to Montana with the intention of
skiing in the winter and fly fishing
in the summer. He’d spent his last
few years with the Forest Service
as a project leader for the agency’s
mountain pine beetle work out of
the Logan, Utah, station. But instead of a peaceful retirement, he
has found himself spending most
of his time defending the trees he
has come to love, hiking out to the
far reaches of the forest to document the beetle infestation.
He and Macfarlane began working together in 2004 after meeting
at a conference of U.S. and Canadian researchers studying bark beetles. It was at that conference, Macfarlane says, that they first realized
they were dealing with “the largest
insect outbreak in recorded history.” A local news story referred to
them as the “whitebark warriors,” a
moniker that has stuck.
“Once you get into whitebark,
it gets under your skin,” Logan
explained. “It was just the ecology and the drama, and everything that’s associated with it in
Yellowstone. I just couldn’t walk
away from it.”
Because they grow at high elevations, whitebark pine trees histori-
HUFFINGTON
02.23.14
cally did not