Forester David Govatski’s three-decade career with the U.S. Forest Service included assignments in Colorado, Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, and New Hampshire. In 2005, he retired from his final station in New Hampshire’s White Mountain National Forest. He’s hardly been idle since then; he continues to lead field trips for groups including the Appalachian Mountain Club, Tin Mountain Conservation Center, and Ammonoosuc Conservation Trust. He is also a volunteer county coordinator with New Hampshire’s Big Tree Program, a volunteer trail maintainer, and an author.
I’ve always loved trees and forests. I grew up in northwestern Connecticut in small towns. Most of my time was in a town called Forestville, which appropriately had a lot of forest around it. Even as a kid, I just loved being outdoors. I spent as much time as possible outside, in almost any weather. My parents sent out a search party when I was 5 years old, because I’d wandered off into the woods. The police and the fire department were looking for me, and when I walked into the house, my parents were astounded that I had got by all the people searching for me.
I had an uncle who really loved feeding birds, so I was exposed to the National Audubon Society as a child. My wife Kathi and I live in Jefferson, New Hampshire, and we have several bird feeders. We have a heated bird bath to provide water for the birds, and they’re pecking on the ice if I don’t turn the heater on. I’ve been all over the country in wonderful places to see birds, and I have a list of all the life birds I’ve seen. But at some point, you realize that you’ve reached a pretty high number, so just enjoy the birds you have. We’ve got so many birds out here – probably 30 or 40 pine siskins, quite a few purple finches and probably 70 or 80 gold finches. But April 1 is coming, and that’s when we stop feeding them, otherwise the bears will be here.
At the age of 13 I joined the Boy Scouts, because they offered some great hikes. Then I found out about the 4-H Forestry Program as a freshman in high school. That program involved maintaining trails, and I think that’s where I got this love of trail work and working with crews and improving things in nature. That was on the blue blaze trail system in Connecticut. If you worked enough hours on trails, you got to go on a trip. If anyone ever turned down a trail assignment, I took it. I probably should have been doing homework or something, but my parents knew that I am a nuts-and-bolts kind of a guy. I like hands-on work as opposed to theoretical stuff.
The first trip I won was to Welch and Dickey mountains in New Hampshire. Instantly, I fell in love with that place – the broad granite dome there and the jack pine growing and the glacial striations. The next year I won a trip to the AMC’s Galehead Hut. It was a long hike in. I met the hut master, Steve Jacob, and just really enjoyed that whole experience. He was what’s called a red-liner. He was hiking every trail in the White Mountains and would mark each trail he’d done with a red ink pen. I thought that sounded pretty cool. I didn’t know how many miles there were, but that’s when I started red-lining. I finished red-lining in the ’90s, even though I was gone from New Hampshire for a number of years. During high school, I also had this amazing gig volunteering with the state of Connecticut to fight forest fires. At the age of 16, I carried a back pump on a couple of fires near Lake Compounce and got out of school if I could keep my grades up. That was in 1966. You couldn’t do that today with child labor laws.
After I graduated from high school, I got a job with the Green Mountain Club on the Long Trail Patrol and spent the summer working on a trail crew, mostly in northern Vermont. I really didn’t have any intent of going to college for at least a year, so when September came, I got a job with the winter crew at Pinkham Notch in New Hampshire, with the AMC. I was involved in the Cog Railway accident in 1967, on a rescue team with folks from the huts and the Forest Service and everyone else that went up there. And I got to work at Tuckerman Ravine in the spring.
In 1968 got a letter from Uncle Sam saying that they’d like me to join the Army. I knew I was going to get drafted, so I went to the recruiting station and signed on for two years. I did basic training in Kentucky, and then infantry training at Fort Lewis, Washington. I assumed I was heading across the Pacific at that time, but instead, they sent me to an NCO Academy – non-commissioned officer academy – at Fort Benning, Georgia. Then they reassigned me to Fort Carson, Colorado, to a National Guard brigade that had been activated to go to Vietnam. It was an armored unit, and they decided they weren’t going to send any more tanks into the jungle, so we ended up not going. I ended up with a job as a fire lookout at Pike National Forest. They trained me for a day, then I was running the lookout, which was pretty exciting for a 20-year-old. Lots of action, multiple radios, some high stress situations.
Eventually, I decided I really should go back to school, so I enrolled in the forestry program at Unity College in Maine and earned a degree in 1976. During the summers of college, I worked with the Youth Conservation Corps crew in the Green Mountain National Forest. It was a new program for 15- to 18-year-olds – 40 of them in a residential camp for eight weeks. The work project coordinator my first year was a Civilian Conservation Corps veteran from the 1930s, and he taught industrial arts at a Vermont high school. He had so many skills, and I admired his skills and his stories. I did that for 6 summers. We were essentially doing a lot of work for different parts of the Forest Service – trail work, campgrounds, even work related to timber sales.
In some way, shape, or form, every year for the past 50 years, I’ve worked with some kind of a Conservation Corps group, whether it’s the Youth Conservation Corps or the Student Conservation Program or even with prison crews that were classified as conservation corps crews. I like working with young people. Last year I had the chance, at Weeks State Park and also at Pondicherry National Wildlife Refuge, to work with a “pro crew” of 20-somethings, and we built this incredible hawk watching platform up on Mount Prospect and did a lot of other projects. It’s just so neat to see the energy and enthusiasm of these people. If you want to save nature and you want to get kids interested in saving nature, the best thing you can do is to hire them and put them to work.
In 1977 I took a job in the Ottawa National Forest, which is in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, pretty far up there, an incredible place. I was there for six years and learned a lot of skills as a forester and a supervisor. I stayed with the Conservation Corps program there, working with the young adult Conservation Corps and the Senior Conservation Enrollee Program. They were really, really neat people in their 60s and 70s who wanted to do some additional work, and boy did they have some skills that young people just have to take a long time to learn.
I learned a lot about forest management there. I became a wilderness EMT. And I got involved in the forest fire management program. It was prescribed burning, a lot of western details. I did that for 6 years, then had opportunity to go to a Forest Service hot shot crew. This is a 20-person crew that’s specially trained and equipped for the hottest fire assignments. It was a long-term training assignment in Oregon on the Deschutes National Forest. I really enjoyed working in Oregon and learned a lot of different skills – prescribed burning, fire and wilderness, and of course fighting large fires. In 1984 I was reassigned to the White Mountain National Forest, and I worked there until I retired, on April Fool’s Day in 2005.
About 10 years ago I co-authored a book, Forests for the People: The Story of America’s Eastern National Forests, with Chris Johnson. It’s the story of the eastern national forests, the history of the Weeks Act, which was the legislation that created the national forests, and case studies of how to deal with various issues – wilderness management, invasive species, endangered species, the timber program. Since then, I’ve written a fair number of articles for journals and electronic newsletters.
I’m trying to visit every national park unit in the country. There are 423 national park units, and I’ve been to 405. There’s one in American Samoa and one in Guam, and there are three in New York City that I may never get to. But that’s OK. I’ve learned so much about American history by visiting these places – the good, the bad, and the ugly. I have a strong interest in American history and world history and especially in the history of the Civil Rights movement. Going to places like Selma, Alabama, and walking across the Edmond Pettus Bridge, going to Montgomery and Birmingham – over the years, these places made such a difference in my psyche of how people treat each other from this artificial construct of what we call race. There’s only one race, and that’s the human race. We’re all the same.
I’m also trying to see every conifer in North America. I’ve seen all the pines and all the spruce. The only larch I haven’t seen is the alpine larch. We’re planning a trip to the Pacific Northwest this summer, and I’m going to go up on the Pacific Crest Trail and take a look at alpine larch. There’s a couple of fir tree species that I haven’t seen out in California, but I’ll get to them. You know, if you go to Florida, everybody wants to go to Orlando and all the other attractions down there, but being a tree lover, I would rather go to see the Florida Torreya and the Florida yew, which are extremely rare species, before they blink out.
I have a lot of favorite places to explore. I really enjoy Pondicherry. I’ve been involved in establishing that as a national wildlife refuge since 1997. We’re up to 6,500 acres now. I enjoy working with the personnel from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and I work with volunteers to maintain the trails. I also enjoy getting up on Mount Washington in the spring to see the alpine plants and the birds. We enjoy going to Acadia and the coast of Maine in early spring or late fall, when there’s not a lot of people there. We have family in Oregon and British Columbia now, so we get out west a couple times of year.
Pre-covid, I had been working in Alaska and Iceland as an expedition ship naturalist. Those were small ships with 160 people and were environmentally the best they could be. I just loved working with visitors from all over the country and all over the world who would want to explore a rainforest in Alaska or go rafting down a river or learn about whales. I’d do five programs during the week on the ship, then typically one or two hikes per day when on shore.
The Big Tree Program is a good chance to get together with a band of people and go out and measure trees. Pretty much every state has a Big Tree Program. It’s under the auspices of American Forests, which used to be the American Forestry Association. Here, the Big Tree Program works through the University of New Hampshire Extension. We use a measuring system that’s a point system and includes circumference at breast height, the height of the tree, and the average crown spread. We have the national champion white spruce in Whitefield, New Hampshire. We have a number of state champions here in the North Country. We’re always looking. I walked by the national champion black spruce probably 200 times before I measured it and finally realized it was a massive tree. Sadly, that black spruce blew down in 2017 and it was especially hard to cut through the tree with a chain saw to open up the trail.
I’ve been very involved in visiting and studying old growth forests for many years. We’re trying to inventory all of the old growth forest that we have in New Hampshire. We are still finding more and more areas of old growth. We have a lot of criteria on how to identify it based on structure and other characteristics. There’s old grown forest in Franconia Notch State Park and in Crawford Notch State Park.
I would encourage young people to look at forestry and conservation work and working in the environment as a career. The old joke is – how do you make a million dollars being a forester? And the answer is – you start with two million dollars. There are a lot of rewards that are not financial. Improving nature and protecting nature is just so important.
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