Much of the field work on National Forests must be done during the 
summer, because most of these forests, being at high altitudes, are 
usually snow-covered in winter. Accordingly, several thousand 
temporary employees are hired each summer for fire protection; tree- 
disease and insect control; brush disposal; road, trail, and other 
improvements; construction; maintenance; and similar forest work. 
3. “How Important Are the Nonprofessional Workers to the Forest 
Service?”’ 
Very important, indeed. Nonprofessionals help the professional 
do the job he has to do. An engineer’s road design for a National 
Forest is useless unless he has a corps of unskilled, skilled, and super- 
visory workers to build the road. In this respect, the Forest Service 
is like any other large organization with its different levels of skills 
and functions which have to operate harmoniously. 
Let’s look a bit closer at the categories listed under the second 
question: 
A. TECHNICIAN .—More and more professions are finding that 
certain tasks that were once performed by the professional 
can be delegated to the technician. In the Forest Service, 
this approach has met with great success. Technicians have 
taken over from the professional foresters such responsible 
and difficult jobs as supervising on-the-ground operations 
in timber sales, recreation-area use, or research activities 
_ that require the use of practical skills and experience; col- 
lecting, consolidating, sometimes analyzing, reporting, and 
summarizing data within guides set up by professionals; 
contacting the public, contractors, and other forest users for 
information or policy enforcement; or supervising a road 
survey crew on a road-building project that will make 
timber accessible for harvesting. 
B. AID.—No organization can exist without people who know 
how to get the basic or preliminary work done. The Forest 
Service is no exception. It has always been fortunate in 
having hard-working aids who not only get the job done, 
but enjoy doing it. 
Aids, even more than technicians, work at a variety of 
productive tasks that help both the technician and the pro- 
fessional. Some of these tasks are: Scaling logs; marking 
specific trees and collecting and recording such data as tree 
heights, tree diameters, and tree mortality; installing, main- 
taining, and collecting records from rain gages, stream flow 
recorders, and soil moisture measuring instruments on simple 
watershed improvement projects; serving on a road survey 
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