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Show 59 dashed for the truck, piling inside and pouring coffee from thermoses held in shivering hands. "We'd be all smashed together," Karen remembers, "squeezing the coffee cups for warmth. After being so cold outside, it felt great to huddle together in that truck. The windows would fog up immediately because we were all so wet." Karen wore jeans, a yellow hard hat, and layers of clothes - T-shirt, heavy work shirt, and down-filled vest. No long underwear, though. "I never knew how the weather vias going to turn out," she explains. "If it warmed up, as it did often, I didn't want $o run and look for a place vihere I could hide from the men while I got my long-johns off." Because all living things, including trees, have a life cycle which ends with old age and disease, the Forest Service assesses the condition of the trees throughout all national forests. When a stand of trees has reached its peak grovith and from then on would begin to decline, it is offered to lumbering companies for harvesting. Loggers bid on the stand, naming sums of money based on the number of board feet they think can be savied from the trees. Then, with the blessings of the Forest Service, they cut the trees following rigid guidelines to protect the environment. Afterward they clear debris from the area. Usually early in the following spring, new seedlings are planted in the cleared area, either by the loggers themselves or by Forest Service crews and Youth Conservation Corps members. Karen's work was a preliminary study called habitat typing: it examined the stage of growth of the various stands. On the basis of |