By Lee Ross
Mountain View Telegraph
On a hot morning in late July the whirring sound of a chain saw echoed in the Sandia National Forest.
The sound stopped and William Metz, a trained sawyer (tree cutter), hammered a few hard plastic wedges into the gap he'd cut in a diseased pine tree.
The tree — which looked to be more than two stories tall — shook, nearly toppling, then Metz tapped the wedge again and quickly walked away as it slowly tumbled over, picking up speed as it fell on a white flag he'd placed to mark where he wanted the tree to go.
Metz did what is called a postmortem on the tree, judging his own technique by the 2-foot-wide stump how straight and flat his cuts had been. He'd made a mistake or two, but success, he said, is not cutting down the tree, but everyone going home uninjured.
Among the dangers involved are a dead tree collapsing on a sawyer from above, the tree tumbling the wrong way, or the stump cracking open as the tree falls, which is known as a “barber chair” and can cause decapitation.
Metz, who has years of training and experience, is part of the Friends of the Sandias, a group of volunteers who have left their fingerprints all over the Sandia Mountains, whether visitors to the area know it or not.
Forest signs, bathrooms, trails and a number of other amenities have been improved by the group, according to Sally Lowder, a longtime member. She, her husband Bob Lowder, Bob Moore and Matt Bosquez are the core of the volunteer group's trail crew, Sally said. Most of the crew are retired professionals with advanced degrees, she said.
“They're just wonderful guys, they really are,” she said.
On July 29 the group worked on a trail near Balsam Glade Picnic Area, cutting down trees that had been attacked by bugs and were tagged by Forest Service employees as hazardous. Once the trees are down, laying away from the trail, they are prepared for haul off by people with the necessary permits through the Sandia Ranger District.
Because Forest Service staffing has been cut back, it takes dedicated volunteers, like the Friends of the Sandia Mountains, to keep the mountain running, Sally said. In fact, the Sandia Ranger District is so short-handed that without volunteers it would be hard-pressed to do its mission, “to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation's forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations,” according to the Forest Service Web Site.
The Friends of the Sandia Mountains has 115 members that volunteer for various projects throughout the year, about 20 of them are “hard-core,” or very active members, Sally said. She estimated the group puts in from 300 to 600 hours of work each year.
Friends' volunteers who are not interested in the manual labor or monthly training sessions needed to do the trail work take visitors on nature hikes to see flowers, birds, explore the forest trails or perform a host of other services.
For more information on volunteering with the Friends of the Sandia Mountains go to www.friendsofthesandias.org or call the Sandia Ranger District at 281-3304.
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