At 05:54 PM 10/20/2005, you wrote:
>Skip wrote:
>
> >Echo Woods was laid waste by an ice and wind storm several years after it
> >was built.  The other gladed areas gradually lost their trees not to
> >deliberate cutting but to wind and weather; the construction of
> >sustainable gladed terrain was poorly understood when these areas 
> were created.
>
>Echo Woods may have been knocked down by a windstorm, but the rest 
>of the trees
>in the original South Ridge glades were cut down rather than being blown down.
>Skip, perhaps this was before your time at Killington? For the first year of
>South Ridge (1976?), all of the trails were glades, or just narrow paths
>between the trees. I will look through my trail maps for proof of this. Over
>the next summer the glades were removed, and then several years later Echo
>Woods came down.


No, I recall it pretty clearly.  I believe the ice storm/blowdown 
occurred in either 80 or 81 (80 was my rookie year at the K.  We had 
to clean up a lot of it and keep EW closed much of the year because 
there were so many upturned roots and gnarl.  Trees came down 
elsewhere as they had to, after dying for whatever reasons... 
including the ones previously cited.


>I have to question Skip's recollection that Echo Woods came down in 
>a windstorm.
>If it came down in a windstorm, why didn't they just leave the dead 
>trees there
>instead of removing every one (spruce trees are not valuable 
>timber)? Also, why
>did it just affect the trees in Echo Woods and none of the trees to 
>the north or
>south of the lift? If some trees were blown down, certainly not all of them
>were, yet all of them were removed. I am suspicious.


Those trees were pretty small in trunk diameter, and not particularly 
tall.  The cleanup was due to the fact that they wanted to reopen 
Echo Woods.  IIRC about a third to a half of the trees in there were 
knocked over or severely damaged.  And as to other trees - remember, 
the other trees outside of the EW boundaries were still tightly 
packed and thus less wind impacted.

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