FAMILY TREES

About 50 yards from the Chrisman family home up the North Fork, there’s a lodgepole pine tree. It isn’t doing very well, at least not compared to the trees near it. The bark is rubbed off in several spots and the tree, quite frankly, has seen better days.

But Allen Chrisman won’t cut it down, even though he runs a tree farm on the 300-plus acre spread, because the lodgepole pine is a special tree for the bears that roam through the place. About a dozen or so grizzlies have stopped by the lodgepole, for whatever bear reason, to rub their backs, shoulders and bellies on that tree. Black bears stop by and rub, too and every once in awhile a mountain lion or a wolf gives it a sniff.

Chrisman knows this because he set up a critter cam nearby, and has many of the encounters record.

It’s almost as if the bears know the camera is there, based on the footage. They almost look like they’re posing as they scratch.

The Chrismans have done an exemplary job of managing the land over the years, not just for trees, but for wildlife, recreation and water quality. For their efforts, they were recently named the Western Regional outstanding tree farmers of the year by the American Tree Farm System.

The Hoiland family — neighbors that live just up the way — won the same honor in 2015.

The Chrisman place is an idyllic spread, but it wasn’t always that way.

The 310-acre property was purchased by Baird and Esther Chrisman in 1958 from the estate of Bart Monahan, the original homesteader who filed on the property in the 1920s. Baird and Esther’s son Allen and their daughter Kari (Chrisman) Wiley, grew up playing in the streams, forests and meadows of their family forest. It was purchased as a family get-away to the mountains, far away from the corn and soybean fields and flatlands of their native Illinois.

But in the late 1970s a pine beetle epidemic killed or was killing most of the lodgepole pine. Allen Chrisman, then a young forester with a degree from the University of Montana, was working for the Bureau of Land Management in Oregon.

He put his education to work and drew up a forest management plan. They clear-cut the dead lodgepole and started anew. Some of the sale was logged by horse, the rest by mechanical means. His first wife, Lynn, died in a sledding accident on the spread and when the sale was complete in 1980, he went out and planted 1,000 ponderosa pine seedlings.

“It was good therapy for me,” he said.

They’ve been managing the forest ever since. In the summer of 1997, Allen took four months off from his job with the Forest Service. He prepared a management plan which met the requirements of the American Tree Farm System and the Chrisman Family Forest was accepted as a tree farm. Today the spread is a mix of larch, lodgepole, spruce, aspen, ponderosa and Douglas fir.

There is no sign of the 40-year-old clear cut. The trees are mostly vibrant, save for that lodgepole the bears keep rubbing on.

“We grow grizzlies and harvest the occasional lodgepole pine saw log,” Allen joked during a tour last week.

Deer, elk and moose call the place home as well, as do weasel, marten and lynx. The old homestead remains and cabins have been added to the spread as well for guests and family, with views of the Livingston Range in Glacier National Park.

Allen, who retired as the fire management officer for the Flathead National Forest a few years ago, admits it’s a lot of work and he could have it contracted it out, “but I get persnickety about the thinning.”

Thinning doesn’t necessarily mean cutting a tree down, either. He simply girdles some trees — they’re easier to manage that way and provide for wildlife.

Little goes to waste. Tree tops are used to create brush piles for small mammals. Doghair lodgepole saplings are laid in rows to nourish the soil and provide cover. Some areas are seeded down, but bushes like buffalo berry and grouse whortleberry come up on their own. The Chrismans are also vigilant about controlling weeds.

The spread even serves as a resting place for loved ones. The ashes of several family members are buried there, in the shade of a giant Douglas fir.

“Our philosophy of life is change is OK,” Kari said.