The air is thick with the clean, sweet scent of pine boughs and fresh sawdust, while two chain saws growl like dueling bears grappling over timbered spoils as a Shoshone National Forest crew removes hazardous trees from a campground.Todd Legler, assistant fire management officer, and his crew are clearing beetle-killed and rotten trees at Eagle Creek campground on the North Fork of the Shoshone River to make the place safer for campers.

The trees are down now, and the men are trimming branches to deck (stack) the logs for a timber sale.

The slag, piles of evergreen branches, is being hauled off for later burning.

It's all a part of the Shoshone National Forest personnel's efforts to get hazardous trees cleared from campgrounds.

“Our plan is to have them (campgrounds) all open this summer,” said National Forest Supervisor Becky Aus of the Wapiti Ranger District.

First, the campgrounds are painstakingly surveyed for trees that could fall, then crews remove the trees, said Loren Poppert, Shoshone Forest recreation staff officer.

Shoshone Forest personnel will have most of its 32 campgrounds surveyed and most of the precarious trees eliminated by this summer, Aus said.

However, all the campgrounds will be posted, warning campers to use caution, Aus said.

Wednesday was Legler and company's second day at Eagle Creek. They've been thinning campground trees for about a month and a half, he said.

“If they're infected with beetles,” Legler said, “they're coming out.”

“It is not just beetle-kill,” Poppert added.

Trees being cut in campgrounds include those killed by pine beetles, those suffering root rot and others with structural defects that could cause the trees to fall, Poppert said.

If trees are rotten or hollow, they are cut too. One such pine lays in the stack. Indeed it is hollow, with a small cavity of red flimsy stuff like balsa wood filling the center. Another tree has a hollow end like a clogged drain pipe.

A Bobcat, equipped with a blade and curling tines that grab trees and slag like a clenching iron fist, scoops up the trees for bunking and heaps the slag upon a trailer. It hums like a brawny bee, dodging this way and that while going about its log-handling business.

It's noisy with the Bobcat and chain saws competing for air space, but when the equipment takes a respite, the peace is permeating. Wind whispers through branches above and the Shoshone River chuckles over stones, vying with the ice to complete its downstream journey unimpeded. An occasional vehicle passes, perhaps 100 yards away on U.S. 14-16-20, barely disrupting the gentle solitude.

Plenty of healthy pines still rise to the sky, giving the place a park-like quality with picnic tables and bear-proof food storage containers waiting nearby for the crackle of summer campfires and the voices of children exploring their woodsy accommodations.

Pine beetles have killed a lot of trees in the Shoshone. There are 823,000 acres of beetled-killed trees in Shoshone Forest's 2.4 million acres, said Susan Douglas, Shoshone Forest public affairs.

“The Shoshone is not alone in this,” Aus added.