No, not the cottonwoods on the border - trees on a historic DC golf course Donnie Dotard wants to re-design. ETTD: Everything Trump Touches Dies.

Park service could remove more than 500 trees at historic golf course Trump wants to redesign

By  MATTHEW DALY

October 10, 2026

https://apnews.com/article/trump-golf-course-trees-east-potomac-e13bd9c369ea4ebc3b95675a22865fb7

WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Park Service has begun a new round of tree-cutting at a historic golf course near the National Mall as the Trump administration proceeds with a plan to renovate the East Potomac Golf Links into a championship-level course.

More than 500 trees “that do not contribute to the historic landscape will be removed” as part of the rehabilitation project, the National Park Service said in a court filing Friday. “No healthy trees that are contributing features of the historical golf course” — including historic cherry trees — will be removed as part of the project, the park service said.

A total of 169 trees will be removed starting Saturday, with another 90 trees slated for removal later, the agency said.

The tree removals come as President Donald Trump has moved to turn the course into a world-class golf venue — part of his grand vision for Washington, D.C., where he has torn down storied structures, remade or renamed others and deployed the National Guard for more than a year.

...

The 106-year-old public course has been embroiled in a lawsuit since February. Plaintiffs including the DC Preservation League say the Trump administration’s reconstruction would violate the congressional act that created the park in 1897. The group sought an emergency stop-work order this spring because of concerns that work was expected to begin immediately on the course...

Sagittarius and the Sagittarius Star Cloud set behind a blue oak (Quercus douglasii) in the Diablo Range foothills, California. The light dome of Hollister is to the right.

Blue oaks, endemic to California, are tough as nails and occupy an important ecological niche that competes with cattle ranching and vineyards for real estate, moisture, and nutrients. After the Gold Rush, grazing from sheep and cattle introduced forbs and grasses from Europe and Asia Minor, which directly compete with native grasses for soil moisture. The animals also ate young oak seedlings and saplings - and later introduced pigs ate the acorns as well. Irrigated vineyards do well on the ~gentle slopes and hot sun that blue oaks occupy, and many of the best vineyards in the Napa, Sonoma and Paso Robles areas are on tens of thousands of acres of former blue oak woodland/savanna.

In traditional ranching country, like where this image is taken, traditionally cattle can be taken off of an area to allow blue oak regeneration - but now pigs have to be aggressively controlled to preserve acorn fall and litter accumulation under trees. While shooting images in this place, I could hear a few pigs very close by who likely wanted at the acorns under the tree where I was parked, and they were close enough that I could hear the wire fencing twang as they went under, looking elsewhere for food. A few miles to the north, the pig damage is starting to be severe enough in parks that extensive action is likely in the near future. Pig numbers are high enough that they are coming into some San Jose neighborhoods for food - especially grubs in turfgrass lawns - yards on gentle slopes that could have been oak woodland before Silicon Valley blew up.

Hopefully this edit is optimized for all devices. Canon 80D, Rokinon 24mm f/2.8 ISO 2500 25 sec tracked x 4 panel panorama, cropped. Stitched with Image Composite Editor, Lightroom.

We have several places we visit every year to look at postfire recovery from the CZU/LNU Complex fires, including this place in the CZU Complex Fire area in the Santa Cruz mountains, in old-growth and cutover redwood-Douglas fir forest, with the typical tanoak-bay-bigleaf maple-coast live oak friends scattered throughout.

This is the second really strong year for Ceanothus growth, and many sprouts from the stump sprouting tanoak and bay are as much as a meter taller than I am now. You can also see the sprouts from the latent buds on redwood, some of which seem to have sat dormant for a couple years while others started the next year after the fire.

We're taught that fire burns in a mosaic, but increasingly as forests dry out due to climate change, fire is burning hotter and a more catastrophic burn may occur in a place. In my post of the flagged Doug-firs you can see much more mortality on the slopes, but here in this place there is much less 'destruction'.

These wind-flagged Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) are in little gullies draining to the beach about 8-9 meters below these bluffs. To the east of the Pacific shore, the Santa Cruz Mountains rise and it is possible this is where the seeds of these trees originated.

In the last image, it is easy to see the gully cutting down, and down through a geological feature known as marine terrace, which indicates the old sea level and remnants of a broad, shallow seafloor ~80-100,000 years ago. The first hill rising towards the mountains in the middle distance is another, older marine terrace, perhaps ~250,000 years old. The charred trunks at the foot of this terrace were killed by the 2020 CZU complex fire, the effects can be seen as you zoom in uphill. As we get closer to the mountains, another marine terrace exists (but is not visible here), and is about 300,000 years old, indicating sea level at that time. On the sides of the Santa Cruz Mountains you can see hundreds of standing dead Douglas-fir, killed by the CZU Complex fire.

I have another series of images (Edit: here) where we've been tracking the fire recovery in the redwood forest on the other side of the ridge to the south.

I was waiting for the full moon to rise the other night and light something else, and this scene unfolded - behind the camera the moon is rising above the ridgeline casting this shadow. These live oaks are in the ~southern Diablo Range in central California, where the Amah Mutsun used fire for thousands of years to favor some plants for food, browse and basketry, and to exclude others to improve hunting for elk, deer, and pronghorn. These tough trees may be direct descendants of oaks that lived through centuries of cultural burning by Ohlone peoples and long, dry summers in a Mediterranean climate.

For this image I was standing on old bottomland soils that have witnessed many transformations. The Ohlone peoples gave way to the Spanish Mission system, here it was Mission San Juan Bautista. The Indigenous communities were brutally removed, and their traditions gave way to grazing and ranching. Nearby, in the direction of this image, is the Santa Clara Valley - the "Valley of Heart's Delight", where productive orchards and truck farms on deep alluvial soil were removed and gave way to today's "Silicon Valley". Some old orchard trees still remain in the older areas of town; our back fence neighbor has an enormous avocado, and the streets in our neighborhood are now active with crows who drop walnuts from hundred year old trees for the car tires to crack.**

The soil in this area has successively nourished productive native societies, fat livestock, vast orchards, and now...the digital economy, which hums just a short distance over the hill as the crow flies.

>Yes I'm bein' followed by a moonshadow
Moonshadow, moonshadow
Leapin' and hoppin' on a moonshadow
Moonshadow, moonshadow

And if I ever lose my hands
Lose my plough, lose my land
Oh if I ever lose my hands
Oh i...if, I won't have to work no more

-- Cat Stevens

** The crows are sometimes a problem at San José Mineta airport, where they are known to drop walnuts - presumably from an old orchard south of the runway - for the airplane tires to crack.

Southern Monterey County is sparsely populated and ranching's glory days are gone, but signs of better times still remain. Here, Italian cypress and eucalypts still protect an abandoned ranch house (with a faint light still on inside). Firewise landscaping was on no one's mind back then. They continue to run cattle in the spring on this land, but the house sits empty except for the critters.

In addition to the sounds of the animals in the house and the normal owls and coyotes, throughout the night to the south, a lone bull tule elk was bugling, moving from one side of the valley to the other, and ending up maybe 750 meters (?) from where I was by the time I was done for the night. A special night for sure, even with the clouds.

I was here for a different set of photos, but the clouds moved in and I had to scramble to get something before it was too late. The Milky Way shines through the altocumulus, and Sagittarius is still visible above the Italian cypress. The light dome of Paso Robles is visible, ~75 km away.

Canon 80D, Rokinon 24mm, f/2.8 ISO 1250 25 sec tracked, Lightroom, light panels, hopefully the right Reddit edits for small screens.

This composition was originally intended as a star trails image, but I didn't like the result so I stacked some images instead.

This location is in the Diablo Range of California, on old Amah Mutsun territory, then grazed by the Mission San Juan Bautista, then it was the Rancho Santa Ana y Quién Sabe from a Mexican land grant.

Today not much has changed, which is why there were very dark skies last night with little light pollution, probably SQM 21.65. A barn owl was curious about this lighting for some reason and flew by several times, I was hoping to catch it in an image but luck was not on my side.

Canon 600D 18-55mm kit lens at 18mm, f/3.5 ISO 800 25 sec x 20, Sequator, Lightroom, light panel.

Bush lupine (Lupinus arboreus) observes a flagged shore pine (Pinus contorta subsp. contorta) on a cliff in Santa Cruz County, California. The marker is from a few miles down the coast, I haven't found the one near this spot yet.

This tree could be old enough to have been a seedling during the great San Francisco Earthquake. Standing through monstrous storms, salt spray from giant waves, herbivory, grazing, construction, logging. What has this tree seen?

It may have watched teams of horses haul Douglas-fir and the last of the redwoods from the Santa Cruz mountains immediately behind it to rebuild San Francisco. A small lumber mill still operates nearby, now processing redwood and fire-scarred logs, a faint echo of an earlier time.

This tree could have watched the tanoaks on these same mountains felled and their bark peeled for leather - including tack for teams of horses hauling logs, boots for the loggers, and belts for city gentlemen. The oaks among the Doug-fir on the sunny slopes would have been felled for charcoal, for the wagons used for hauling, and for the docks built to move the logs to San Francisco. These same docks would also receive the last of the whaling ships that this tree may have seen steam offshore to search for an ever-shrinking number of whales for market.

Almost certainly it watched teams of surveyors, then engineers, then motorized shovels - powered by California's abundant petroleum - build the early portions of the famed Pacific Coast Highway (Highway 1), connecting Santa Cruz to Half Moon Bay. Perhaps our tree was still too small to cut down for firewood for a road crew's dinner. It watched the iceplant in the second image slowly creep over everything - iceplant planted by ambitious men to stabilize slopes for railroad tracks.

This tree - battered daily by wind and salt spray - has survived to see men peer through devices to look for whales, to survey for roads, and now for pictures on social media. If it survives 50 more years, what new wonders will it see?

[Edit: text dropped for some reason]

I received an e-mail today from CalTrans because I participated in a survey for their Big Sur management plan.

Seeing as there was some...erm...interest in a recent post on this sub about what is being done about the fustercluck around Bixby, I'm passing on their announcement that they are keeping the survey open through the 4^(th) of July holiday weekend. Those interested in sharing their views on tourist traffic in Big Sur can fill out the survey here: https://engage.dot.ca.gov/f70063#tab-75884

My input to County Commissioners, CalTrans et al has always been that enforcement needs to increase, and therefore funding for enforcement needs to increase; tax the tourists for more Sheriff funding because they'll pay for experiences no matter what, and tickets are revenue as well.

Share your constructive input and solutions here: https://engage.dot.ca.gov/f70063#tab-75884 .

[edit: formatt^(ing)]

This is another image from the trip I made to the Gabilán Range in California. The skies were very dark due to marine stratus suppressing the light pollution of the cities to the south and west. The skies were SQM ~21.75 or better, no wind, no dew, no ranch lights, a rare and beautiful evening.

Canon 80D, Rokinon 24mm, f/2.8 ISO 3200 4 panel vertorama, 15 x 8 seconds/panel, Sequator, Lightroom, LED panel light.

I went to the Gabilán Range recently near Pinnacles National Park in California and was treated to very dark skies, as the marine stratus had crept in, suppressing the light pollution of the cities to the south and west. The skies were SQM ~21.75 or better, no wind, no dew, no ranch lights, 3 vehicles all night, a rare and beautiful evening.

Canon 80D, Rokinon 24mm, f/2.8 ISO 3200 4 panel panorama, 15 x 8 seconds/panel, Sequator, Lightroom.

This morning in our neighborhood.

Can anyone identify the trees in the silhouette sculpture on the gate? I don't think they're native to this area...lol.

A ranch gate has a metalwork sculpture depicting cattle and trees, with the Milky Way core in the background, above a ridgeline topped with Coulter pine and interior live oak.

This image was a test panel for a panorama, taken in the Gabilán Range, California north of Pinnacles National Park at about 700m (2300 ft). in mid-June. The metalwork trees point out specific features in the sky - the left tree pierces the constellation of Sagittarius near the teapot's spout, and the right tree points at the galaxy center. The bright region above the cattle is the Sagittarius star cloud (the steam from the teapot). You can also see one of the Dark Horse Nebula's forelegs pointing toward the gatepost; South American cultures, who evolved without horses, saw this animal as a llama and the aboriginal peoples in Australia saw the region as part of the great emu.

It was very dark skies in this direction on this night, as the marine stratus had spread south down the Salinas Valley and suppressed the lights of the towns there. It was a quiet evening aside from the insects, with a pond nearby with very noisy bullfrogs, otherwise only a few coyotes howled and owls hooted.

Canon 80D, Rokinon 24mm, f/2.8 ISO 3200 8 seconds x 7, Sequator, Lightroom, light panel.

This Coulter pine (Pinus coulteri) sits on a dry hillside in the ~Gabilán Range overlooking the Salinas Valley, with the Santa Lucia Range beyond, and to the right in the far distance on the horizon is the Pacific Ocean. Last night, the marine stratus spread inland and south down the Salinas Valley to a depth of about 1000 ft (330 m). I believe the lights are Soledad Prison. Venus and Jupiter are visible in the upper right.

These hillsides at ~this elevation are mostly chaparral (chamise, manzanita, ceanothus), and on the favored slopes are mainly blue oak, interior live oak, and coulter pine. Frequent fog provides valuable moisture and temperature relief in the hot, dry Mediterranean climate; this fog and marine stratus made John Steinbeck what he was, and helped shape him into one of the best American writers.

>“The high gray-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great valley a closed pot. On the broad, level land floor the gang plows bit deep and left the black earth shining like metal where the shares had cut. On the foothill ranches across the Salinas River, the yellow stubble fields seemed to be bathed in pale cold sunshine, but there was no sunshine in the valley now in December. The thick willow scrub along the river flamed with sharp and positive yellow leaves.

>It was a time of quiet and of waiting. The air was cold and tender. A light wind blew up from the southwest so that the farmers were mildly hopeful of a good rain before long; but fog and rain did not go together.” - John Steinbeck "The Chrysanthemums"

[Edit: formatt^(ing)]

San Mateo coast, California. This area is a favored haul-out for elephant seals and sea lions. In the middle distance in the second image, just out of the water is a juvenile sea lion.

In the first image, these are shore pine, Pinus contorta subsp. contorta. In the second image we see shore pine, and on the ridgelines in the distance, we can see the skeletons of trees killed in the CZU Complex fires of 2020 - mainly Doug-fir with scattered redwoods still standing and resprouting.

Redwoods grow here due to the frequent fog - we describe the warm season fog that the redwoods require as: Graypril, May gray, June gloom, no sky July, Fogust, and it can be as much as 3 inches (7.6 cm) of precipitation equivalent.

You can see evidence of the frequent fog in the second image - in the distance over the ocean, the marine layer is visible, and tiny clouds are just beginning to form over the ridgetops as the marine moisture is lifted to the condensation level by the heating of the hillsides from the mid-morning sun.

Offshore, the ocean is upwelling, pushing up cold water from below. Bait fish feed on critters rising on the cold water, and birds feed on the bait fish. Look for aggregations of birds on the water, because whales migrating north will be feeding on the bait fish as well. Some of these shore pine have been watching the whales migrate by this spot for a century or even longer.

Recently I was at the edge of an oak woodland in California's Diablo Range taking astrophotos; I set up a camera to take star trails, and this is one of the images from that session. In this image you can see the ~violet stars of the Big Dipper in the upper left, and the varied star colors of constellations including Cepheus and Cassiopeia on the right.

This location is adjacent to an ephemeral stream and the image is looking towards a valley. In the ~middle distance below this framing are low mountains peppered with surprising intrusions of igneous rock, perhaps giving rise to its early European name Quien Sabe. This subject tree may mark the edge of the extent of the groundwater from the ephemeral stream, as just beyond there are only scattered trees on the valley floor.

The oak savannas in the area historically were maintained by purposeful application of fire by indigenous groups such as the Amah Mutsun/Ohlone peoples (before their removal to the Spaniards' monasteries), so they could have easier access to acorns, encourage growth of deergrass and sedge for basketry, and to clear vegetation for harvesting of alliums and soaproot. My other camera was set up next to a patch of deergrass, waist high, seedheads not ripe yet.

Throughout the evening I could hear the sporadic calling of the last of the tree frogs, insects advertising their location, coyotes calling and a distant farm dog howling in return, screech owls, deer walking amongst fallen oak branches, and early in the evening the screeching of young wild pigs - sometimes too close for comfort. After the moon rose, I packed up my gear as the insects and other animals quieted down as the moonlight brightened the landscape.

Canon 600D: 18mm f/3.5 ISO 800 205 x 30 seconds, StarStaX, Lightroom, light painting.

Image: Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images

After years of fierce debate, a large-scale Southern California development project seems to have finally moved past its tallest hurdle: protecting one of the world’s oldest trees. Jurupa Valley, the Riverside County city of more than 100,000, in the sprawling Inland Empire east of Los Angeles, has been bitterly divided for years over the fate of a specific Palmer’s oak that rests in a rocky wash of (currently) open land. The tree, thought to be at least 13,000 years old, is not only historic; it’s also considered culturally vital to the Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians’ Kizh Nation.

https://www.sfgate.com/california/article/oldest-oak-protection-22255349.php