Picture the Rocky Mountains in early spring: snow still piled deep, roads half-buried, and delivery trucks unable to get through. Yet thousands of young pine and fir seedlings, grown hundreds of miles away in a nursery, need to reach the ground before the spring thaw ends. According to Snow Cache Seedling Storage: Successful Systems , a 1974 U.S. Forest Service report by researchers Allen Dahlgreen, Russell Ryker, and David L. Johnson, the agency addressed this with something almost embarrassingly simple: it buried the trees in snow, and sometimes flew them in by parachute.
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