And we’re off! The starting bell for TreeFight 2012 officially rang on June 24th, when a big yellow school bus pulled up to the clock tower at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, and 28 Jackson Hole High School freshmen-to-be piled out of the bus into the hot June sun.
So we’ve learned that if you try to get smartphones donated by a phone company, they require you to buy data plans. That dog won’t hunt. Especially since old smartphones equipped with wifi work great for what we want to do, which is take geo-tagged pictures and post them to treefight’s instagram account and add them to our visual database for monitoring. (Yes, old iPhones without wireless plans receive GPS …continue…
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 …continue…
TreeBall is the culmination of a summer coming to the aid of the endangered whitebark. Its principal component is an exhibition and auction of our treefighters’ photogravures and other prints. Each image will be first included in an online auction, which will transpose to a silent auction for the event. Also included in the exhibition and auction will be works from renowned professional photographers and artists, their art interspersed with …continue…
This summer, TreeFight and the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival collaborated to bring students from both the Jackson Hole High School and the Middle School into the whitebark forest atop Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. It was an initiative that JHWFF director Lisa Samford had dubbed ‘SummerQuest.’ After their experiences, students at the Middle School ‘Summer Academy’ (sounds better than summer school, right?) turned their thoughts into some truly amazing blog …continue…
This summer, TreeFight brought more than 100 students into the whitebark forest, where they learned about the plight of the Whitebark, protected trees with pheromone pouches, took geotagged pictures of trees (and many other things), shot video, and gained a powerful, personal sense of what climate change is doing to the most important pines in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Click ‘More’ below to check out a gallery of images shot …continue…
‘Fighters, Two expeditions this week: Thursday: We’re going to hike to Goodwin Lake with Forest Service representatives to discuss whether we should be protecting the whitebark around Goodwin Lake, which the forest service prefers we not protect, since the trees are within designated wilderness. This is an informative hike, a discussion, a meeting of the minds. Given the endangered status recently bestowed on Whitebark, and given that the Wilderness Act …continue…
Last week, a small crew headed to Mt. Leidy to see how our trees fared since last summer, and to reprotect them with verbenone. We made a visual survey, and as far as we could tell, they’re doing great! It’s gratifying to see the huge ones surviving another winter. I even thought we had a completely clean slate. But as we were driving out I saw a freshly hit tree …continue…
By Taylor Rees Muster the troops. On Friday, January 14th, 2011, at Jackson’s Center for the Arts, TreeFight kicks off its second year. To get the momentum rolling, we’re joining forces with acclaimed artist Thais Beltrame, who will be celebrating the Whitebark Pine, object of our affections, with a wall sized mural in the Center gallery. Here’s the link to the Facebook event.
This is a test of the Microsoft Photosynth application, which will hopefully allow us to create a number of visually immersive, panoramic “plots” to accompany data from our protected standsin the Bridger Teton National Forest. To view the forest, you have to download the Photosynth plug-in. Once the plug-in is downloaded, you can scroll across this panorama, zoom in and out, and view it in fullscreen, in fine detail. Or …continue…