Washington has about 21 million acres of forest land. In 2003, over 1.9 million acres of this land contained elevated levels of tree mortality, tree defoliation or foliar diseases. This is up from about 1.8 million acres in 2002.

The warm sunny weather allowed us to complete the survey in record time this year. We finished the bulk of the survey by August 23rd - a new record! We later re-flew the Mt. Baker area to make sure we did not miss portions of the hemlock looper outbreak there. We also returned to the Fawn Peak complex wildfire area in the Northeast Cascades when temporary flight restrictions associated with fire suppression had been lifted.

Unfortunately, we again had a few problems with the automated sketchmapping system and had to fly the San Juan Islands and other isolated areas on paper maps. New refinements to the software made the system more solid and versatile, but it was still often temperamental.

Smoke from fires in Montana, Oregon and British Columbia made visibility less than ideal, but since there were relatively few fires in Washington, we were generally pretty lucky.