u.s. forest service

Road Trip 2009 hits 4,000 miles in Glacier National Park

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Mont.--I'm kind of awestruck. For four years I've been doing CNET Road Trip projects, and every time I've hit a new thousand-mile milestone, I've stopped, photographed the odometer and the surroundings, and then blogged about the spot.

In almost every case, that new set of zeroes on the odometer has come at some nondescript location. There have been a couple cases where it happened near something incredible, but I'll be honest: I've cheated a little bit and, say, driven back and forth across a parking lot to have the milestone … Read more

At FireLab, studying how fire works in order to battle it

MISSOULA, Mont.--If you're going to decide how to fight fire, then you'd better know as much as possible about how it works.

That's the idea behind FireLab, a U.S. Forest Service program at the Rocky Mountain Research Station here, where scientists spend their days studying, among other things, the dynamics and behavior of fire, as well as ways to better predictively model how fire might spread.

And while, as scientists, the folks here don't set policy, it is their job to give those whose jobs is to set policy the best data possible. The … Read more