A Beautiful Mess: Felling trees in a Tennessee National Forest to replicate what nature used to do

Source: Trout Unlimited

It’s a warm spring morning and the sound of chainsaws is echoing through the Tennessee mountains.

This is hardly an unusual scene, but the mission here is.

This isn’t someone getting a start on next winter’s supply of firewood. It’s a crew from Trout Unlimited, using powerful Husqvarna saws to fell large trees into Sugar Cove Creek, a tumbling mountain trout stream in the Cherokee National Forest.

The trees will stay there, in the creek bed. And trout — as well as communities downstream that will become more resilient to flooding and benefit from cleaner source water for municipal water supplies—will reap the rewards of this work, which is celebrated in the new TU short film, “A Beautiful Mess.”