Thinking about Christmas trees reminded me of how fast things seemingly permanent can change overnight. Growing up on a tree farm, although the trees were not really a farm as typically defined, so much depended on the surrounding forest of which the trees were part. One year a forest fire burned a portion of the property wiping out large trees and exposing the underlying terrain on which new trees were grown.

Interesting to me was seeing hillslope features that I didn't know were there-something that carries over to present day mapping after fires clear the land and prime the slopes for landslides. A fungus needle disease almost wiped out the new growth one year, of the forest and the farmed trees. Was it related to the earlier drought years? Probably.

And, as I became interested in the landscape, the old wood plank roads from the logging days and how the streams converged into forks feeding the nearby river, I became fascinated with how change can happen so quickly and also so slowly. I've been fortunate enough to see almost instant changes with hillslopes coming down, putting my hands on moving slide planes. I've seen floods carve out new river beds and carry away trees towards the sea. I've been able to walk along fresh fault scarps and see things that are gone within days after large earthquakes. One of my favorite images in my mind's eye, and captured somewhat in the photograph here, are the offset vehicle tracks on the Twenty-nine Palms training area after the Hector Mine earthquake. Without the tank and other tracks from an earlier exercise, the surface rupture would still have been expressed but somehow the impermanence of the tracks and how they appeared at first to cross the pop-up structure of the restraining bends along the fault before one realized that they too are offset...that somehow hit home.