Before the bulldozers

In a thicket of lodgepole pine near Glacier National Park's Apgar Village, the forest floor is riddled with strange potholes and missing slabs of moss.

The culprits are nearby: a crew of Montana Conservation Corps workers armed with shovels, delicately extracting uncommon velvet-leaf huckleberry plants from the ground.

They also are scooping up prince's pine, moss, and other vegetation that will be used to landscape around the park's new Apgar Transit Center. Some plants will be put to use for revegetation projects elsewhere in the park.

"What we're clearing now is the footprint of where the parking lot will go," explains Joyce Lapp, Glacier's restoration biologist and manager of the park's native plant nursery.

It's not your typical site-preparation work.

The plant salvage effort will carry on for the next two weeks, before trees are felled and bulldozers move in this summer for actual construction.

While it's a labor-intensive effort, Lapp says it's actually a highly efficient recycling project.

Rather than burning slash piles in a national park and purchasing plants and potentially weed-infested topsoil for landscaping, all the vegetation, topsoil and trees salvaged from the six-acre project area will be put to use.

"We're trying to reuse as much material as we can," Lapp said.

The site's dominant lodgepole stand - a product of the 1929 Half Moon Fire - will yield trees for corrals and fencing throughout the park. Some moss patches were salvaged last fall and moved to a heavily traveled section of trail in the Avalanche Gorge area.

Lapp looks over a hemlock sapling that has been removed from the site, its root ball wrapped in a black plastic bag, and notes that growing a similar tree at the nursery would take about eight years.

Some plants can't be transplanted.

Beargrass, common on the forest floor at Apgar, is difficult to relocate because individual plants tend to be linked in groups to "parent" plants.

But some are highly desirable for transplanting, such as huckleberry species that have so far proven impossible to cultivate in a nursery.

Salvaging plants is an entirely time-sensitive endeavor.

"The plant material is still dormant, so digging them up now is far less injurious," Lapp said. "We couldn't do this is July because we would lose everything."

"The snow just melted out of here a week ago or so," said Matt Whithed, the park's revegetation crew leader, who has been hauling topsoil and plants in black potting bags from the transit center site to a nearby draw that serves as a storage area.

This work started Monday and has been moving along quickly, Whithed said.

"It's going pretty fast with the Montana Conservation Corps crew," Whithed said, referring to the seven people doing the shovel work.

The plant-salvage effort is expected to play a part in qualifying the transit center project for a "gold" certification in a federal Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program that encourages sustainable construction concepts, including recycling of natural materials.

Lapp is basically the founder of Glacier's revegetation program. She was hired in 1987 with Federal Highway Administration funding to do work associated with Going-to-the-Road reconstruction along Lake McDonald.

"I was hired to build a nursery," Lapp said.

And that's what she did.

Since then, the nursery has developed protocols - what Lapp calls "recipes" - for cultivating 235 plant species native to Glacier Park. There are also "recipes" for successful revegetation projects at different elevations and different forest types.

"We really have done a remarkable job of documenting the work we have done and monitoring it," she said.

Lapp also has been involved in exotic plant and weed control in the park, a job that involves inspecting gravel and fill that's hauled into the park for any construction project.

The transit center, estimated to cost $5.8 million, is easily the biggest facility project Glacier has undertaken in recent years.

The center will serve as a west-side hub for an expanded transit system - the main element in a package aimed to offset the impacts of a Sun Road reconstruction project that's expected to take at least eight years.

While visitors still will be able to drive their own vehicles on Sun Road during reconstruction, the enhanced transportation system is intended to reduce traffic and provide visitors with easy access to Sun Road and other destinations in and around the park.

The park gets roughly 16,000 visitors a day during peak periods of the summer.

The park soon will consider bids for transit center construction, which is expected to get under way this summer. The center is expected to be operational in summer 2007.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com