Blogging
From Abroad

Ok, I could not go without telling you about a really neat excursion I had the pleasure of enjoying last week. For Field Camp II, we spent a week doing all sorts of wonderful things. We stayed at the bottom of a ski lift in a dozen, small alpine huts. The view from our hut was tremendous!

The first few days were spent collecting data to calculate the differences in carbon sequestration of 2 stands that had different silvicultural (manipulating the forest) treatments. Wow, this was quite labor intensive!

But that didn?t mean we couldn?t horse around in the forest a bit!

The next day we went to Gesäuse National Park in Steiermark. This park was recently apportioned in 2001 and included many peaks over 2,000 meters (-: We hiked to the Hesshütte which was about 1,700 meters, stopping along the way for brief talks by the professors to give everyone a taste of high-alpine forestry and how it has evolved. For this day, the Masters Programme in European forestry joined us, as you can see in the below photo, we were quite a long line of us (47 in all!)

It is much more slippery than it looks! Completely covered our boots in ?Gatsch? (mud)! (-; The higher we hiked up, the better the scenery got!

We made a quick pause in an area that remarkably black soil. A professor told us that in former times the people that lived on this alp used to burn the trees to make charcoal to carry down on their backs to sell. This was because it was very difficult to drag or carry trees from the alp. Of course, some goof ball has to smear it on his face (-:

After a superb hot lunch at the Hesshütte of nudelnsuppe and a cold radler (beer with lemon soda) we paused for a lecture here. If lectures were held in this location everyday instead of the classroom, I would have absolutely no problem attending! (-;

Also, the view from the Hesshütte, simply magnificent isn?t it? (please excuse the dark blur towards the bottom left-hand side, my cameras lens cover has been acting up lately)

Along the path down, a random cow blocked our way, I took a funny video of the occurrence, which I will attempt to load, but here is a photo of the moment:

The very next day, we had the privileged opportunity to visit a private property managed by a monastery. In order to transport all nearly 50 of us, some had to jump in the trailer pulled behind a truck, what a wild ride!

For lunch, these young lads who worked for the monastery brought up a most delicious ?breidl jausen? which means mountain snack (my absolute favorite meal to enjoy on an alp!! (-: ). It was served as seen below with red deer meat jerky in several forms, bergkaise (hard mountain cheese) as well as fresh rolls in a variety of sizes.

We paused a few more times for the professors to speak a bit, I am especially infatuated by high altitude afforestation (tree regeneration and planting). You see, at high altitudes trees are especially stressed for growing conditions, so the individual microsite in which a tree can grow is more important than ever. This also depends on the purpose of the tree, whether it exist for avalanche protection, rockfall prevention or erosion control, a forest can be designed to provide what is needed by man, all the while mimicking the natural processes which have evolved to balance the ecosystem. I would absolutely love to develop a masters thesis on this topic (I hope- fingers super crossed!!). A short exam was given and then we all piled into the trailers again for a bumpy ride back down the mountain!

Check back for more blogs, I update them as quick as I can and you enjoy them at your leisure (-: