1906 



FORESTRY AND IRRIGATION 



517 



conducting field work in the Uinta 

 Forest Reserve, finds that the drainage 

 basins upon which Ogden, Provo, Lo- 

 gan, and several smaller towns depend 

 for their water supply, can be greatly 

 improved by forest planting. A good 

 nursery site is available near Kansas. 



A city watershed project in the 

 Pecos River Reserve has been report- 

 ed on favorably in a preliminary re- 

 port by Mr. H. P. Baker and Mr. F. 

 J. Philips. The Gallinas River and 

 Santa Fe Creek drainage basins con- 

 tain several good planting sites. Plant- 

 ing will benefit the water supply of 

 Las Vegas and Santa Fe. 



Mr. John D. Guthrie, who has been 

 conducting watershed studies and es- 

 tablishing rangers' nurseries in Idaho, 

 has been transferred to the San Fran- 

 cisco Mountains Forest Reserve to 

 take up rangers' nursery work. After 

 he has covered this reserve he will go 

 to the Tonto Forest Reserve for simi- 

 lar duty, and, in addition, make a spe- 

 cial study of the conditions in the 

 vicinity of the Roosevelt dam of the 

 Salt River irrigation project. 



, Plans for rangers' nurs- 



NurSKes eries . are beginning to 



come in from the techni- 

 cal men who have been assisting in 

 starting these nurseries during the 

 summer. Wherever possible, shade 

 frames have been constructed and the 

 ground prepared for seed sowing next 

 spring. The plans submitted will be 

 edited and copies sent to the rangers 

 concerned. Actual work is being un- 

 dertaken this fall only where perma- 

 nent headquarters have been estab- 

 lished. The nurseries thus started un- 

 der technical supervision will serve as 

 models for the rangers in undertaking 

 similar work in the future. 



many reserves. Should these tests 

 prove successful, similar work will 

 probably be carried on in other places. 

 The preservative treatment of west- 

 ern yellow pine telephone poles with 

 creosote oil has begun at Los Angeles. 

 Several different methods of applica- 

 tion are being tried, and excellent re- 

 sults have already been obtained, both 

 with a special butt apparatus and in 

 open tanks. 



Two experimental pieces of track 

 are now being laid in Washington and 

 Montana on the lines of the Northern 

 Pacific Railway. These are laid for 

 the purpose of testing the effect on 

 ties of metal and wooden tie plates, 

 and the durability of red fir and tama- 

 rack ties treated with zinc chloride and 

 creosote as compared to seasoned and 

 green untreated ties of the same spe- 

 cies. 



Mr. A. F. Potter, Ill- 

 Grazing spector of Grazing, has 



attended stockmen's 

 meetings at Butte and Helena, Mont., 

 and Albuquerque, N. Mex., in the ef- 

 fort to make clear the policy of the 

 Forest Service relative to grazing in 

 the reserves and to correct misunder- 

 standing regarding it. A resolution 

 was adopted at Butte, Mont., in which 

 the stockmen expressed satisfaction 

 with the information given. 



Reserve 

 Boundaries 



Forest 

 Products 



The Forest Service will 

 experiment this month 

 to determine the best 

 method of treating fence posts cut 

 from dead lodgepole pine on the Hen- 

 ry's Lake Forest Reserve. Large bod- 

 ies of burned lodgepole pine exist on 



A great many more ap- 

 plications for agricul- 

 tural land under the act 

 of June ii, 1906, are being received 

 than were expected, and Mr. Kent, 

 who is in charge of the field examina- 

 tion of the lands applied for, has asked 

 for four more men to assist him in the 

 work. Already two reserves the 

 Priest River in Idaho and the Bitter- 

 root in Montana have been covered, 

 hi the former reserve all but a very 

 few claims were approved and recom- 

 mended for listing, but in the latter the 

 applications were found to cover heavy 

 timber land and were purely of a spec- 

 ulative character. If cleared, they 

 would, with irrigation, produce good 

 crops, but no water for irrigation was 



