Time to start TreeFighting again.

We’ve honed our plan, marshalled our resources, and fished the bear spray out of storage.

We’ve got seedlings to plant, whitebark to protect, nutcrackers to track, art to make, parties to throw, and many miles of hiking in the high alpine ahead of us.

Today was our first ‘mission,’ as the 12-year-old WWII fighter pilot buff in me likes to call them. We headed out with Taza, our intrepid Cornell ornithologist, to set up a monitoring station, where throughout this summer, we’ll watch and listen for the avian architects of the forest, clark’s nutcrackers, whose importance to our keystone species (whitebark don’t reproduce without their help) mean their population dynamics are damned important.

Mostly today we picnicked in a meadow surrounded by pines, under a banging bluebird sky, and discussed how to turn two 15.2-meter lengths of cord into one length of cord exactly 25 meters long, without a ruler or measuring tape. Miss Just-Took-My-GREs thinks she had a better method than me. Phhhfft.

Please, join us on a treefight mission this summer. It’s a good time to fight for your forest.