[socialist_coder]

I could be wrong, but I think that "untouched" forest is not really going to be so nice unless you let natural wildfires come by every decade and clear out the undergrowth, or you have a lot of big animals naturally making trails, or you have forestry employees keeping up the forest.

So, if you have a few acres of forest yourself, none of the above things are going to be happening, you actually have to build trails through it and then maintain them. And, you will constantly have fallen branches and fallen trees that need to be cleared. It's a lot of work. I have a few acres of forest in the PNW.

[smeej]

I hear this a lot from a West Coast perspective, but I don't understand it.

Northern New England is almost entirely forested, and it isn't managed or maintained to anything like the same degree as West Coast forests, and yet we don't have the problems with giant segments going up in smoke every year. We don't even really have suburbs. We just have towns that are mostly forests, separated from each other by areas that are completely forests with one road going through.

I'm (obviously) no expert in this, but it seems that our largely untouched forests do a lot better than the ones that are so intensively managed. I have to imagine this has been studied and state maintenance of forests isn't just some giant government boondoggle that leads to massive fires and no one's noticed, but that's how it looks from several thousand miles away!

[amanaplanacanal]

Part of it is just different climate. The west coast is mostly what is called Mediterranean, which means we have almost no rain during the summer months. By August everything is dry as a bone and ready to burn. Don't you guys get rain pretty much year round?

[mountainb]

There's just so much moisture in the plants that fires don't do that much under most normal circumstances in New England. Storm damage is a bigger concern but that just makes trees ugly/dead or has them falling on power lines and houses. Rotted trees are just wet, gross, and full of bugs -- they're not necessarily fire hazards.

[mountainb]

In the northeast we don't have wildfires like that. It's just too wet especially in the river valley in which I live. And 'winter' is basically 6 months long.

The undergrowth just uh, under-grows unless you expressly clear it out to make it more pleasant to walk around in.

[watwut]

Do you really think all forests are regularly cleaned? That just does not seem to be the case and only some of them have regular fires.

[socialist_coder]

Not all forests, obviously. But the ones that people are generally hiking in, the trails are maintained. Not many people go off trail.