Ryan Trapani is the director of the Catskill Forest Association (CFA), a nonprofit which provides forest services and education to 1,100 members. He has worked in forestry and forest recreation for more than 20 years. In addition to doing on-the-ground forest and tree work, Ryan also writes about forest topics for a number of publications and hosts CFA’s “From the Forest” podcast, which has been running for 15 years. He lives in Ulster County, New York, not far from where he grew up.
I grew up in New Paltz, New York, at the foot of the Shawangunk Ridge. I spent most of my time playing sports. But more than sports, I also always looked forward to riding my bike in the woods, far away from any referees and umpires, which I thought was liberating. I really liked looking for wild fruit. My aunt used to pick mulberries all the time, so maybe that was it. Or I was hungry. I would look for apples, pears, raspberries, black caps. I mostly saw cottontail rabbits back there, but I remember the first time I saw a turkey. Turkeys only came back in that part of New York in the ’80s, when I was a kid. At the time, we didn’t know what it was, but looking back on it now, it’s like, of course.
My friend’s dad was a logger and a trapper, and that was my introduction to forest management. It made me really interested in the woods, helped me see that that was an option. It’s hard to get access to people like that, so it really shaped things for me. I began hunting with him, but then college almost killed it. I feel like college uproots you, takes you out of where you grew up, and it takes a long time to get back to hunting, because hunting really requires roots. They call it a sport, but it seems totally different – to me it seems more like a way of life.
I went to Boulder to attend the University of Colorado because I really liked mountains, and I thought any mountain would do, the higher the better. But it was the high desert there. I wanted to go back home to where I knew the woods. I wanted deciduous trees and four seasons. So I transferred to SUNY-ESF Ranger School, which is out in the middle of nowhere in the Adirondacks. Only about 40 kids go to it, and I got my associate’s degree there. It was started by Word War I veterans and is one of the oldest forest tech programs. I was in the military reserves for six years, from 1998 to 2004, and got called in after 9/11. That interrupted things a bit, but I went back to school after getting out and graduated with my bachelor’s in environmental science and forestry from Syracuse in 2005.
I became a wilderness ranger, patrolling the backcountry in the Slide Mountain area in the Catskills for the Department of Environmental Conservation. There’s about 50,000 acres of wilderness there. It was awesome. I got paid to talk to the public and to hike around and camp out. I really enjoyed bushwhacking and trout fishing all the time. After that, I worked in the Green Mountain National Forest, in the Breadloaf Wilderness area.
I’m in Olivebridge, New York, now, and have been with the Catskill Forest Association since 2007. I started as their education forester and did all the events. We didn’t have field services back then, it was all education. In 2017, I became the director. The Catskills are unique: the average parcel size is 20 acres. It’s not traditional forestry; it’s a different niche somewhere between remote arboriculture and backyard forestry. Some days we work on an individual tree and some days we open up a couple oaks to sunlight. We’re serving people with less than 30 forested acres. We have 1,100 members and do over 300 consultations a year and 600 programs. Programs can be any kind of field service: pruning, grafting, invasive species management, portable sawmill, mushroom cultivation. We also host about 20 educational events, usually either presentations or woods walks. The work is really seasonal, but I also write articles and newsletters and organize the radio show.
We started the podcast, “From the Forest” in 2010. We’ve done over 700 shows now, and to me, it’s one of the best things we do. It’s become a library of topics. We talk to all kinds of people from around the country doing anything forest related: biologists, trappers, maple producers, people who work in prescribed burning or ginseng production. It’s nice to get feedback from CFA members, and a lot of the guests are suggested by members.
It’s interesting to talk about how the economics have changed so much in our rural areas, how vibrant many of these communities were until farming failed in ’70s and ’80s. We did a podcast on this local tannery in Montgomery, which is something that no one really does anymore. I do hobby tanning where I take deer skins and make leather, and with the leather make hats and belts and pouches. I like simple, tangible things. Deer is a way of life. I hemlock tan them, which is kind of a heritage product in the Catskills. It’s hard to learn about now; I mostly read books from the 1800s to learn about it. I’d like to see a more diverse economy, especially when it comes to wood products, and see more low-grade markets. It gets back to housing and zoning, there’s so many interconnected parts – things are not conducive to building a sawmill now, or to buying a home. The regeneration of our forests is important, and the regeneration of our communities is equally important.
Recently we’ve been talking – and I’ve been writing – a lot about fire. Some of our forests, even in the Catskills, have a pyrogenic legacy that’s still obvious. We’ve got oak, hickory, American chestnut, low bush blueberry. I grew up near the Shawangunk Ridge and that rivals Long Island as far as pyrogenic history, but instead of being sandy and by the ocean, it’s a mountain. Up top it’s all dwarf pitch pine. They’re only four feet high but date back to the 1800s. There were even commercial blueberry pickers that would harvest there until the 1940s. When you walk around there, it’s in your face that fire was a big deal there. Other places, it’s more subtle. We’ve lost touch with our history of fire, even though it did burn a lot in some places. It’s hard to do now, especially on private land, but I’d like to see more fire. It’s a tool to think about.
Being in the Army Reserves shaped how I think about leadership – you see a lot of good leaders and you see a lot of bad leaders. I like to lead by example but also let people be more intrinsically motivated and figure out what their thing is. Things like grafting, practicing silviculture, you have to be willing to try things out. Because each time you approach it, it’s different – different tree, different microhabitat. There could be deer browse, or you could be on the north or south side of a mountain. I think it’s important to not be afraid to fail. If something isn’t working, you try something else out.
The most meaningful part of the job is to get to serve people on their land. I’ve gotten to know a lot of people, and their trees, over the years. I get to see things grow and change. Sometimes I realize I’ve been pruning the same tree for seven or eight years, and that’s neat. I go on different properties all the time and constantly see different people. So I learn a lot, not only about forest types, but about them as well. It’s really about communication, which sets it apart from being an arborist or forester. I get to educate people. It’s cool when at first you get someone dead set against cutting, and then after talking with them about costs and benefits of all of it, they start to understand it. Then you have advocates who will talk about cutting with others. We also have a legacy tree program, where we plant two trees per property. It’s not a lot, but it adds up. I like that; you get to see it over time.
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