Arne Johanson has been volunteering with the Jackson Hole Weed Management Association for the last seven years, working in Game Creek to mitigate noxious invasive plants like knapweed and musk thistle.
Credit: BRADLY J. BONER / NEWS&GUIDE
This article is reposted from Jackson Hole News & Guide
Arne Johanson is an army.
Gloves tucked into his pocket, trash bags in hand, he drove up Game Creek trail earlier in August with a single mission: Kill all weeds.
Little by little, he worked his way up. When he and his two fellow volunteers spot the tell-tale deep magenta head of an invasive musk thistle out the window of Johanson’s truck, all three jump out, snip the plant’s flower, and pull it from the ground.
“One thistle head has 500 seeds,” Johanson said. “This stops those 500 seeds from growing into plants.”
Johanson repeats this routine every week, every summer. This is his seventh summer pulling invasive weeds up Game Creek.
“There’s always one more weed to pull,” Johanson said.
He volunteers for an all-hands-on-deck Jackson Hole Weed Management Association’s group of nonprofit and governmental organizations curtailing the spread of invasive weeds in the region. Control operations stretch from scientists leading groups of perennial pepperweed sniffing dogs, to small citizen volunteer groups like Johanson’s.
The association’s work is a means of protecting the region’s delicate web of ecosystems.
“Invasive weeds push out the native plants, which pushes out the pollinators, and takes food away from the elk and the deer and the bears,” Johanson said.
When confronted with the scale of what he is trying to protect — 3.1 million acres of Bridger-Teton National Forest, 310,000 acres of Grand Teton National Park — the work of the association and volunteers appears impossible.
“Every fall, the wind blows invasive seeds deeper and deeper into these hills,” said Johanson, pointing up the Game Creek trail towards Cache Peak. “And they accumulate, and blow even more seeds.”
Even in the 2-mile section Johanson and his fellow volunteers have been working on since 2017, invasive thistles poke through the dense, fragrant flowers of native goldenrod, hollyhock and parsnip.
But when Johanson started, there was no sign of the native plants now blooming at the trail’s edge.
Four miles up the trail, past Johanson’s line of defense, this still rings true. Johanson drove the News&Guide to a sight that once looked symmetrical to the section Johanson and his fellow volunteers pick through now. Rather than dense native plants interspersed with a select few invasives, thistle grew thick and knotted, leaving no trace of flora diversity.
Musk thistle are some of the invasive weeds that Arne Johanson plucked from Game Creek last week.
Credit: BRADLY J. BONER / NEWS&GUIDE
“Nature is so quick to heal herself, given the chance,” Johanson said.
This realization, of nature’s eagerness to heal herself, took time for Johanson to come to.
Before retiring and moving to Jackson, Johanson lived and worked as a computer systems engineer in San Diego. With a background in computer engineering and little knowledge of the natural world, he fell into conservation out of chance — beginning by restoring a small patch of land to be an outdoor classroom for his son’s high school.
From then, he “was hooked.” After finishing the high school project, Johanson “raised his hand” to help manage a slice of wild land left by a bankrupt land trust. Overtaken by invasive weeds, Johanson thought the only option to restore the land would be with herbicide, native plant seeding and an expensive irrigation project.
“There was no money to work with,” Johanson said. “I don’t care how many times you multiply zero. It still doesn’t buy you one single plant and it comes nowhere near an irrigation system.”
That’s when he stumbled across the Bradley Method.
Developed by a pair of Australian sisters, the method is simple: If you uproot the weed and remove the seed source, native vegetation will grow in its place.
“It assumes there’s a nature seed store in the dirt,” Johanson said. “I hand-pulled one section of weeds that year. The next summer, it was a carpet of wildflowers. It blew my socks off.”
He took the Bradley Method wherever he went next — from an 800-acre burn zone he helped California Game and Fish restore, to a riverside park, to, after moving to Jackson in 2017, Game Creek.
Johanson points out small patches of Game Creek where the Bradley Method wasn’t used — patches sprawled with herbicide to remove invasive weeds. There, grass grows thick and tall — but without wildflowers, bushes or other plant diversity.
“People kill the weed, without thinking about what else it kills,” Johanson said. “Without thinking about what comes after.”
Certainly, for some invasives, herbicide is an essential tool. Noxious invasive plants, like leafy spurge, are harmful to the touch and have highly complex, rhizomatous systems. This means the plants grow from their roots, so simply pulling them from the ground will likely not kill them.
For the non-rhizomatous invasives, Johanson and other volunteers are tackling on Game Creek, the slower-moving, environmentally friendly Bradley Method is key.
“You can’t work on a human timescale, and say ‘I want this to be done,’” Johanson said.
Fighting off invasives requires, instead, what Johanson calls “the 5 Ps.”
“Patience, persistence, planning, partners and knowledge,” Johanson said. “The final P is silent.”
Patience to watch flowers spread over the seasons; persistence to continue, in spite of the relentless spread of invasives deeper and deeper into the forest; planning to know what to pull, where to pull, and when. This “P” — planning — is most of the mind game for Johanson.
“It’s not necessarily about running toward the most infested spot,” Johanson said. “Even though it’s tempting.”
At Game Creek, Johanson first tackles areas with the least weeds. Those areas then become seed banks, where seeds from native species will blow through heavily disturbed sections.
Partners and knowledge, Johanson’s “fourth and fifth Ps,” call upon the power of community responsibility.
“We are all neighbors to the national park and forest,” Johanson said. “We all have a responsibility to protect that ecosystem.”
Whether it’s volunteering alongside Johanson, training to become one of Jackson Hole Weed Management Association’s “Habitat Heroes,” or understanding what triggers the spread of invasive weeds, community work is the backbone to fighting invasive weeds — and restoring the expansive ecosystem that encircles Jackson’s community.
“You only need to learn one weed,” Johanson said. “And then you have all the knowledge you need to help.”
Community members can sign up to volunteer alongside Johanson at TCWeed.org. They can also “learn one weed,” through TCWeed.org, or by checking out Teton Conservation District’s “Morgan’s Nature Handbook” videos, where wildlife specialist Morgan Graham walks watchers through invasive weed removal and identification.
Yale student Sophie Lamb is working in the newsroom this summer. Contact her via slamb@jhnewsandguide.com.