Tell us about how drought has played a role in your management.

The drought is the primary driver right now–it has been for the past 25 years. I’ve been dealing with it since I started. And I’ve seen the effects over 20-plus years of being here. We’ve gone from small lightning strike fires to a 14,000-acre fire. So, as the drought has increased, forest health has gone down. Those trees just don’t have enough moisture. They’re stressed, and you’ve got other minor insect and disease issues that can then take off due to drought.

How are you addressing the wildfire challenges here on Trinchera?

I’ve been focusing on doing a lot of mastication fuel reduction along our boundaries in the last five years. Our responsibility is to protect what we have and be a good neighbor. I don’t want to sit back and say, “Well, somebody else should be taking care of it on that side of the fence.” Let’s work on our side and be a really good neighbor. All of the forest treatments are reducing that fuel loading, reducing the impact of that fire. Is it going to stop it? No, but it can slow it.

Tell us how opening up your thinning program benefits overall forest health and wildfires.

By opening up that forest, we’re increasing the native forbs and grasses out there, which then, in turn, brings in more wildlife and creates diversity in our timbered areas because it’s so uniform across the landscape all one age. I’m opening that up and getting a mosaic of what we all think was there historically. Then, you have that diversity for different species, and there’s more edge effect for the different birds, mammals, reptiles, and insects, which will improve the habitat.

How does managing a private forest like Trinchera differ from an agency or federal forest like the US Forest Service?

What makes Trinchera different is that it’s private. We’re not tied to all of the regulations and oversight from the public. We have the freedom and the autonomy to actually implement on the ground and be able to do it quickly. For instance, when dealing with the blowdowns–we couldn’t get there in December, but by spring, once those areas dried out, we were in there harvesting. We don’t have to go through a bunch of procedural stuff to get in–we’re ready to go when these things happen. We can also be adaptive in our management practices–we can be flexible and move with issues, where our federal and state partners have their hands tied. That’s the beauty of working on private land–you can get to these issues and handle them quickly and efficiently.

I know that Trinchera invites universities and researchers onto the property, could you talk about them a little bit?

We have worked and partnered with Yale University, Colorado State University, Utah State University, and more. Whether it’s the forestry program, range program, or fisheries, we here at Trinchera are looking for that science-based knowledge to build and improve our program. The universities also get to provide the experience for these graduate and undergraduate students in getting out and researching and understanding how the real world works.