Redwood Reader

6. The Healing Power of Nature Part II
The first thing noticeable, besides the dust, was the short canopy. As we come to a bend in the road there are old bank failures in the creek canyon almost the entire length. The creek has cut deeply unto the marine sediment soil in the recent past. Precipitous cliffs and washouts are everywhere. Pools in the creek are filling in from falling banks. Small rills cut gullies through the meadows, and the remaining hardwoods in the open are falling every time the wind blows. Scalding sun killed many seedlings and radiated blazing heat, even the water in the few remaining pools was hot. We park under several huge old canyon live oaks, and the area looks pretty normal, except there is a cliff seventy-five feet away, and some holes in the ground on this side of it. Tops of young fir and a few alders stick out. The creek is about fifty feet below us.
Following the road down a way the next bend is on an awesome overlook, created by mass wasting. Here it is about a hundred feet down to the creek, but the road cuts back sharply to the right and goes down to the creek. The road used to go straight along this ridge after the fire, the entire property length of half mile, but most of it has collapsed carrying huge amounts of sediment into the creek with it. Now alders growing on the creeks edge, forcing it into a channel for better or for worse, mark the creek below. They fix nitrogen, hold boulders together, add nitrogen leaf litter, create shade, habitat and insect food. Their roots take a beating in winter, so that many die and many are sprouted each year. The other odd thing here was the fact of how deep the creekbed was from the apparent surface of the meadow.
Further up the opposite slope skid trails ran to every stump, or ended in midair as another washout emerged. Several old gullies had obviously carried big water. Big stumps and old logs were still laying around, and the unburnt hardwood forested areas were young, roaded, with stumps but very pretty forest to walk in. Boxing this area in were two washed out side drainages, connected by an old road. This area had been logged, burnt, roaded, destabilized by activity uphill and is the meeting point of two fault lines. The road was mostly rock, creating a two way runoff channel. Both side drainages suffer severe damage between here and where they empty out into the creek below. Far too much runoff was exacerbating these old problems.
Runoff was not a good thing. We are led to believe we can drain any situation and make it work but experience tells us this is not a good thing. Runoff is the result of imperfect precipitation interface. Somewhere more water accumulated than the ground could absorb in however long it was there. What determines the grounds ability to absorb water is the porosity of the soil, which is directly a result of glomalin activity. The older the tree, the deeper and widespread the roots, the more water it takes to reach saturation, the less runoff is created, and the water lasts later into the dry season. It takes a really big storm to flood old growth areas, but these same size storms create lots of road runoff, or intercept natural drainages and add water to the wrong areas, creating destructive torrents.
Glomalin allows us to see the chain reaction caused by the cutting of large tree cover. First, no more fog is captured, and no CO2 captured for manufacturing of sugars. The hole in the canopy allows rain to pound the ground. The ground has been compacted by machinery, exposed to sun light and air, and had channels carved in it by dragging the tree out, so that the rain accumulates as runoff and begins doing damage by carving into the soil and destroying the glomalin and hyphae in the soil, liquefying it. In steep areas slides and mudflows result.
Meanwhile, starving mycelia are beginning to die, unless supported by networked secondary vegetation like brush or select cuts, furthest (deepest) ones first, and the watershed begins to shrink. Glomalin does have a life cycle and so must be replenished or else it cannot perform its function correctly. As the watershed shrinks the ability to handle large events dwindles. Without adventitious tissue, the Douglas fir roots die and begin decomposing. Each year less and less glomalin remains in the ground, and root wood is weakened. After ten or more years no strength is left as the stump rots out and more soil lets go. For this reason stump sprouting species are much preferred for harvest.
In a large rain event under these conditions no canopy exists to slow the rain, and all the rain is in contact at the decision point: soak in or run off, there is no drip or residual moisture lingering after the storm has passed, no duff holding residual moisture or protecting the fungi on the surface. A large percentage of water runs off into drainage, lost to terrestrial ecosystems and delivered with sediment into streams, rather than pure water from springs and headwater areas. Some of the runoff dissolves further glomalin as it runs down slope toward the creek, creating slides as it goes and delivering more sediment to the creek. The creek pools fill with sediment, gravel beds choke and the streambed becomes shallower. In a good rain the creek jumps its banks easily because the land is not absorbing the water and the creek has lost its volumetric capacity. It scours the creek side stripping it of vegetation and becoming a torrent itself moving boulders and the color of chocolate milk, and creating a mess where it meets the river, where large sediment drops out as gradient decreases. Lighter sediment sweps downstream, settling into and filling pools and slow areas.