Good evening all. My name is Zach Freeman. I'm the owner of Apex Trailworks based here in Randolph, Vermont and I'd like to welcome you to the Gear House and the Recreation Trails and Ecological Integrity presentation by Carl Russell. This evening is meant to be a discussion and inspirational talk to inspire you to take a little bit of what you hear and and take it back out with you on the trail either to Trailhead a trail build, a volunteer work day, and just as you move throughout the forest there's going to be good tips and thoughts and concepts that Carl will go over here this evening. And I've known Carl for over 20 years, have great respect for his approach and connection to the land. He has great respect for the ecosystem and a wonderful perspective on on how to move throughout the forest. Before we do get going a couple housekeeping agenda items, we do have a bathroom in the back for folks to use if they'd like. If you don't or if you haven't been in the Ridgeline Outdoor Collective Trail Hub room that's through that room right there or through that door right there. That's our club's trail room that has all of our trail maps in it and there's hats and swag in there to buy as well. Please help yourself to refreshments and cookies and also you have to buy something tonight. Got a little off point here, but you know the most important point of tonight at the core of the message is how we're going to try and enhance and broaden our outdoor recreation's community's perspective on how we build, use and curate our trails. As we all know the last couple of years the uptick of users has pushed more and more folks out onto trails both close to town and further into the back country and with that we just really would like to kind of focus on the message because I think that's really the at the core of where the missing link is we feel. The trail organizations, the people connected to a lot of the trail organizations, the builders have a pretty strong relationship and respect for the trails from a trail builder and an organizer standpoint and the users sometimes don't quite have that same perspective so I think it's on us to really you know continue to push that message and help change that perspective of even if you are on vacation we still need to really really really respect the lands that you're at even if it's you know just for a day or a weekend. I myself am a lifetime lover of all things recreation. I built trails since I was a little kid and love the forest with all of my heart and I want to make sure and I want to make sure that we balance trail building and the users so they don't you know take precedent over ecological integrity. This is a balance between trail usage and letting the ecosystem thrive and grow and so Carl will touch on that and go into depth about his perspectives there. It is a balance between the builders and the users and we should constantly reevaluate our perspectives to ensure we are being mindful of our practices, how we operate, what we do, where we go to make sure that we are that we're that we're going in the right direction for long-term use. I don't know who here knows Aldo creditable anybody so there's there's a great he's kind of the grandfather of a lot of this thinking and there's a a small snippet from his land ethics essay that kind of rang loudly to me yesterday when I was working online for stuff and it's a snippet that was published in 1949 from the evolution of a thinking community. Aldo Leopold recognized that his dream of a widely accepted and implemented set of values based on caring for people for the land and for all of the connections between them would have to evolve in the minds of a thinking community. We are all a part of a thinking community that needs to shape the land ethic for the 21st century and beyond. To do that we must engage in thoughtful dialogue with each other inviting a diversity of perspectives experiences and backgrounds together we can form a land ethic that can be passed down to future generations generations and that just really spoke loud to me and I think it does to everybody here too. As we embrace Leopold's ethical principle is we shouldn't preserve the integrity stability and beauty of the biotic community. So what does ecological integrity mean? Where do building trails and trail users fit into the picture in a sustainable way? Standing beside me is Carl Russell from Russell Forestry Services and he will take a deeper dive into what we can do to collectively ensure we're preserving ecological integrity while enjoying the massive health and well-being benefits of trails and outdoor recreation. So, Carl Russell, thank you for being here. Thank you. It goes both ways. I have a lot of respect for Zach and the work that he's been doing and his development as a young man. It's been fun to watch take over the town of Randolph. I also started as a kid with trail building working with the YCCC when I was 15 and it was a great exercise and it and it's carried me through my forestry work too because in forestry we have a lot of trails for all the work that we do. So basically I'm a forestry consultant and log with draft animals and I've been focusing on ecological and environmental forestry for almost 40 years now and it's interesting. I didn't get a Leopold quote but I'm bringing Leopold to the table tonight because it's all sort of where I started out. So my primary objective tonight is really just to start a discussion. I want to come away from here tonight having planted some seeds so that people can continue to talk about what ecological integrity can be or might be and how that fits into our mindset when we're in the forest. I'm going to cover some basic concepts related to the challenges we face developing recreational opportunities in the forest lands of Vermont. What I'll share with you is not meant to be an expert view. There are a lot of people in this room right here that have a lot of insight that can share. There are people in our communities and people to come who will have good ideas but if we like like that or like Mr. Leopold said if we have a thinking community and we're we're expanding our thought about these issues about how we interface the land it's an ongoing conversation and I want to make sure that everybody understands that this is you know because it's a discussion it's an inclusive discussion and if you've got something to say tonight please raise your hand anytime that I say something that gets triggers you that you want to say something absolutely raise your hand and speak and and if it's something you want to say but you didn't feel like saying it tonight track down Zach and myself and talk to us at another time. So Zach I'll move to the next slide. So this topic came up in our conversations because of the back country bicycle trail development increases so does the business sector and with the attractiveness of the outdoor recreation drawing more people into these environments that they may not be familiar with and as the economic sector increases there's an opportunity for increased numbers of recreational consumers and the aesthetics and physical challenges of the natural setting that bring people to ride in these woodlands can distract users from the ecological values that are are there and and and those are the values that can be degraded by that use and that's just a picture I stole off of the off of the statewide but it's I feel like it's important because there's a big financial push now in the state to to to see this see growth in this economic sector and I think it's timely to be talking about this. So another person that I did quote is Lauren Isley he was a an anthropologist and naturalist author and and this he wrote in 19 oops next slide I pushed it here but it didn't happen there so there that's the quote woodland biking has a unique unique opportunity users of well-built thoughtful design trails can become stewards of the Vermont landscape by supporting and adopting an ecological ethic the attributes of the outdoor recreation are attractive to significant portion of the population who can ride an e-bike but they may not actually be able to see the environment that they're riding in they may not have an understanding of it and we have a long history of using natural resources with a focus on a particular attribute and that focus oftentimes is upsetting and eventually destructive to the to the economic or the ecological relationships around it so I thought that this was interesting quote from Lauren Isley just because it sets up the mindset that we we bring with us as as evolutionary humans there's a lot of activity and a lot of ambition to sort of our environment next one so ecological integrity is an interesting topic and I use the word freely because integrity is a concept really but there are a couple of different ways to look at it and one is that it would be descriptive of a wholeness of an undivided complete structure of an ecosystem where all the parts perform necessary functions in a normalized continuing process another would be that integrity can also be more generally like a like structural integrity the unseen force interaction between integral parts to secure the whole and in that really in that those relationships are sensitive and can be affected by outside forces however really the scientific community actually doesn't recognize ecological integrity as a as a concept because there's in nature in a natural setting there's so much fluctuation so much variability so many ecosystems are actually reactive so they there are there are ranges of ways that enter that biological organisms interact with each other and so it's too complex to measure so ecological integrity is not a a measurable concept so it can't a lot of scientists don't want to use it so I'm really just bringing it tonight as a more as a concept and the and we'll go to the next slide I think it'll that's just a picture so but the when the human choices create an impact on the given biological community our actions make us integral members of that community whether we're aware of it or not and this is where I like to put the emphasis on integrity because do we usurp and take control over the the environment that we've just invited ourselves into or do we have access to our own sense of integrity and honesty and authenticity to interact with the biological organisms in our environment and that's I think is at the basis of Leopold's ethic it's it's really about the human integrity not necessarily about the ecological integrity when you um so if you um if you can get the concept of of the fact that you've entered into a series of relationships with your environment and you now think that you want to protect that in a way there's a there's another human problem or a human issue that comes in in the next slide and this is no that one there yeah shifting baselines and this is a long long-term human reality pure water is essential but a little bit of impurity it's hardly noticeable right even a lot of impurity at times may not seem to destroy the water it isn't just soiling the water that's the problem it's that our indifference to the change that eventually leads us to accept that our water is impure and that's the sort of how over time that baseline of pure water changes and we just let it change and that happens in relationships it happens to our ecosystem it happens in our communities so um in this case it leads to in the case of my example pure water it leads to the development of technology to clean the dirty water instead of stop making dirty water so we even still we keep that that paradigm functioning there so the next slide back in the 80s i visited mount st helens and we we drove up through the pacific northwest forest in the in the blast shadow of the hill and all the trees were were lush and dark and green and moss everywhere and ferns and you come up over the hill and you come into the road that heads to the to the mountain and it was absolute desolation just black and gray and just vacant and just um total desolation and as we drove a few miles in a few I don't know this was like a half an hour to get to the mountain and we spent some time there and we came back a few hours later and there were plants everywhere there were green plants flowering plants everywhere in that landscape but I hadn't seen them because my eyes had been used to the lush green of the forest that we drove out of and when I saw the desolation it was such a distinctive difference that I didn't see those little spots of green out through there but on the way back I did and so I just offering that as an example for someone who's grown up in an urban environment who's um you know conceptually they understand that there's a forest but they haven't spent time in the forest they haven't um they don't have the context so when they come into the into a forested uh ecosystem it's a it's a lot easier to just put in the earbuds and grab the handlebars and just ride because they're that's it's a great it's great vision it's a great aesthetic but they're not um engaging in knowing this the surrounding so this is really probably the shifting baselines is probably even more important than than the ecological integrity because without getting a grip on how your perspective aligns with the reality that you're in you're going to be able to understand the ecological integrity yeah some years ago I think it was probably I don't know 15 years ago or so and I believe it was a PBS report about the black forest in Germany and at that time people were realizing that the health of the forest was suffering they couldn't quite figure out what it was until finally the realization was that the people that lived there the general population that loved the forest so much uh were we're cleaning it up too much yeah you know making it pristine and tidy and so they had to change their their thought process to leave that stuff there to decompose you know and feed the forest yeah and then we we experienced that here a lot you know with our forest industry doing whole tree harvesting this people doesn't want don't want to see wasted wood in a forest any longer but it's it's not necessarily ecologically sound you know because the of that nutrient cycling and so and people oftentimes would like to see the sides of the trails cleaned up you know I worked with a bunch of horse loggers in Maine at the Moffka forest over there and Moffka is the main organic farmers association and they have a strong environmental ethic and all of the wood lots we worked in around the the common ground fair area had to be cleaned up we had to bring all of the dead wood out of the woods um so it's just it's like it's that environmentalists want to see a clean forest it just doesn't there's a gap there in terms of the reality I'll just take that one step further to you go out west and they clean the understory because that's fuel for forest fires yeah and so they clean that all the dead stuff and the shrubbery and stuff but they're not quite relating out to the ecosystem and how that's needed to sustain predators and all the bugs and stuff to continue yeah it's so interesting to see because the forest forest started to completely clean around certain areas and that becomes a reality for people like the generations of people living in the black forest they that becomes their context of what the forest should look like and I'm not you know as I said these are these are human habits that we I mean that were passed down it's not and um so it's nobody's to blame but it's uh it takes time for people to understand and then point out to other people so that they can see what they're what what they're um what they're interfering with so off-road bicycle trails are particularly concerned for soil erosion and water quality protection the tires are designed for increased traction but they easily disturb soil under the path and the narrow path typically creates or can become a channel for water runoff and over time that can be a serious it can lead to a serious erosion problem and so I just was one of the things that I've noticed from some of the organizations that I looked into restrict off-road or restrict trail riding to certain times of the year when the trails are dry or even if there's a you know a weather anomaly or something like that but it's a good it's sort of a first step for an organization to really drive home to their users that this organization has an environmental ethic and our first and primary impact is water quality and so that means today we're not riding trails it could be the middle of the summer but you had a gully washer you haven't had a chance to get around to look at the trails nobody's getting on it with a bike because that's our commitment to the to water quality so that's just an example yeah and I will add from Vermont mountain bike association standpoint and the 28 chapters throughout the state through a few of the the apps that are out there trail forks being one it's at the forefront of a lot of these clubs that are trying to open and close trails yeah it's virtually impossible to have open and closed signs on the trails but with the convenience of an app in your hand that you can say hey is that is that open or closed and and boom that club closed at last or you get a notification says it is closed that's closed correct and so I think you know to the credit of vimba and and and all of the clubs are doing a really good job trying to put that message out there a lot of our clubs trails are closed during the winter and don't even open up till late spring until all of the volunteers have time to go out assess the trails and check the condition and then we all talk and then we say yep they're good to go they're dry and there's certain trails and sometimes on orderly aspects up higher that open later you know so I think we're we're doing a pretty good job but we can always well so the there's two parts of that one is a good job protecting water quality that's the organization's closing down the trail whatever it is it's protecting water quality but the organization has an opportunity to educate its users to bring them in as stakeholders and say today none of us are riding on this trail because of these this commitment that's so that's where there's like two sides to that the organizations are probably running out there to make sure that they don't have a water quality infringement you know and making sure but at the same time they also can be broadening their their environmental ethic by uh by making this a teaching point I think you could substitute tires for hiking sticks too sure I've noticed that on trails that are heavily used and well foot traffic yeah yeah they all yeah yeah it's it's a tough one yeah yeah yeah I don't think really we're in a bike shop and Zach builds bike trails and so I was focusing on that in this conversation but it absolutely is I mean you can see that the logging industry is not always on top of road building and trail building either so there's it's there's and that's a dangerous slippery slope is like well they don't do it so that's where sort of the ethic of the organization is really important for people and users to start to just band together on these things so that it's not like he said she said or they're doing it I'm not gonna do it and yeah one and to that point I think that the forestry in the logging industry here in Vermont has really began to step up with the formation of of the amp the acceptable movement management practices and really trying to get the loggers to to to adhere to these acceptable management practices with water mitigation water will run off and it's beginning to come to the forefront because of the the the environmental impact everybody's seeing it from every different user group of all different industries I think people are becoming a lot more aware and it doesn't matter if it's recreation or logging or development or something it's it's all becoming more and more on the forefront folks mind I think consumers are getting more used to it I know in my forestry business my clients are willing to pay for construction work to build trails that will last and will be will maintain water quality so in the past loggers weren't doing it because it was going to cost too much so next slide so this is another example of sort of what we were just talking about this is probably a lot of people have seen these it's just you know a sign and some lines on the top of the camel's hump or Mansfield where the alpine vegetation grows it's so fragile and it's an it's an attempt to all in that case bring every hiker that goes by that sign becomes a stakeholder they're they're part of the problem or the solution and we've all seen examples of people who think it's funny to step over the line and do it but if there's somebody I mean you told me a story and tonight I told another friend of mine told me a story in both of those cases you and the other person both went over and spoke to those people and and encouraged them and educated them encouraged them to get on the other side of the line and and so and that's sort of that's what we're talking about is just put the ethic in action you know put put little things out there that you know maybe you don't want to have the place littered with signs but some signs that say that that there's something that to look out for yep next one so this is another way for users to become familiar with all the different aspects of of the natural environment the an Vermont agency of natural resources natural resource atlas has all you know layers after layers and I just created a splotchy field so you could see it but you probably some of you do see it but for every one of these attributes you can click on it there's some kind of a circle right there which is probably a natural community if you click on that on this site then it will give you an information site information sheet about the the attribute that you're that you could be riding through or that you are riding through it you've got trails I mean and these are deer wintering areas and so there are it's primarily it's general information it's not going to tell you that this is a brown bat hibernaculum it's going to tell you that it's a some kind of a rare mammal but but it but it's general and it'll tell you why it's why it's noticed why it's why there's a mark on the map and that way users can inform themselves at a general landscape level this is just landscape level stuff but it it gives the user an opportunity to to start to delve into what it is that they're they're experiencing out there and that this is online and it's free to be used can I add that yeah so this is a really amazing tool for folks that haven't been to this this is the state website that has every recorded geological and environmental feature that the state records from from roads to wells to soils to wetlands to slope angles to waterways to everything it's all the layers on the left hand side it goes these all break open it goes far beyond my head of things that don't don't I don't need but from a from a trail builder standpoint and a trail planning standpoint I and others use this website often to refer to if we are looking at an area to potentially develop this is the first stop we go we go to the state and our map we bring up all of the layers we bring up hydro soils the wetlands the vernal pools the deer wintering grounds all of these little fires and that kind of helps us shape if this is a good spot for this trail does this interfere with the ecosystem does this interfere with the watershed how many stream crossings are there you know what's the slope angle and then from that from state and well from state funded trail projects we need to go through a permit review sheet process which gets reviewed by all of the environmental state agencies at dc and and uh an r an r thank you and what they do is then they look at all the layers on their own maps so if we from a trails trail building standpoint and planning standpoint are ahead of that and shows that we're good planners and and this maps a huge asset for for a lot of different aspects but it's it's well worth the time to jump in and jump around and explore because it's a wealth of the of the info for sure so i have i had done some research into trail building for the conservation commission in bethel and um founded a couple of studies um from some large trails that were developed in in a natural area near some urban uh near an urban area and that study was um you know a comprehensive environmental type of the study but it was actually a very informative pamphlet and and that's another tool if you're already cataloging this and you're putting together plans on on certain trail sections you you might find that that's something a resource that could be made available in the hub over there absolutely yeah so the next slide so trails are excellent this is just a trail just i was trying to find i couldn't but trails are excellent ways to get people into the woods you know that they're where they probably that wouldn't go anyway or may not have ever gone before um and they could be a conduit for unintentional destructive um impact but they also can be a very effective way to keep people keep the impact in a specific area keep people away from the from areas that you don't want them to impact and many times people focus on the trails and um because that's why they're in the woods that's where they're going they're on the trail but if if the trail is put in a and it goes to what you were just saying if the trail is put in a particular place because of a particular feature that you don't want to interfere with then the fact that people are using that trail is a benefit to that to that attribute and that's another educational opportunity to let people understand that the reason that they're riding their bike there is so they don't impact something elsewhere and and and you can be specific if you know what it is but that's another way to make the user a stakeholder that um and and so the alternative you know there are a lot of trails that that frustrate users and they go off trail maybe not so much with bikes but you hear about it with skis skiing a lot in the winter environment is much different than than the bike but has similarities um but if you have a trail so the point of that was that if people don't understand that going off trail works against their interests in you in having the trails if the trail is here to protect to give you an opportunity to be out in the environment it it's also an opportunity to protect the environment so if you leave that trail you're you're breaking down your own objective like this is just a few bullet points uh yeah just a few pointers about uh trail building location and design to find the resources to help you identify sensitive sites that could be the county forester it could be an r it could be a naturalist that you know in the in the community there are statewide biologists who specialize in this and as I was getting ready to talk uh to pull this together I was thinking there are people in the green mountain club there there are um I just dropped another well anyway there's a bunch of different or there's a wildlife biologist that I know of who has gone and testified at a certain a couple of different communities that were considering trails so there are people who can be brought in and and um asked to give a final go over on a trail to make sure that that things haven't been some really important things haven't been missed or something but basically find those resources that can identify those sites um use the amp water water quality guidelines even on a single track you've got to be able to you have to be able to back up these uses with some kind of protection to point out kind of something um for the trails here in the green mountain national forest the NEPA reviews are pretty in-depth and lanky lengthy um and now there's a they're probably lanky too lanky and now there's the SHPO reviews there's an there's an additional environmental impact review that's required that um that some of the folks that are uh that are planning the Belmont Trail are going through this new SHPO review process that is I believe a state review it's pretty new um and that uh those two reviews are are very in-depth and a lot of eyes are on these projects um and for the federal stuff it takes sometimes years to get the approval but they've got the funding it's tough it's tough for a trail like a trail builder communities yeah they're small but if you but if you're sensitive to it then that's I think one of the points that that I would like to make is that if you start now in 40 years it won't bite you in the butt because you it's part of your ethic it's your message you've been working you've showed you've been working at it and in 40 years the back country in woodland biking is going to be an exemplary organization that's that's been working to preserve it's not to pervert but to preserve it's uh it's natural surroundings um oh well one thing I talked with Zach about before as well and other landowners who I work with is that um try to in in certain wherever you can try to combine with other trails that are already there forest trails or even um natural corridors or something maybe um power lines I mean just as samples of things just try to use trails that are already in corridors that are already being used um so that you don't have to have spread out the the trail system everybody has their own trail that they want to travel on and and if you mix and match where you've got the single trail in some places and you've got forestry roads in other places and it's a a way to but if the forestry roads aren't aren't taken care of it could be much more difficult um they do tend to hold water sometimes and I found it I have private private clients that want the trail tread improved yeah within a logging road and I just need to look at it say I'm not gonna touch it yeah because it's just it's already a water quality it's a slippery slope and you you need to add so much material in there to maintain it it's easier to easier and more sustainable to build the trail kind of parallel to that you know crown the right way drain the right way slope the right way I do the so it's it's hitting I do the same thing when I go into a logging job I don't take the trail that was poorly laid out yeah so hopefully as we change our practices going forward um from both recreational user and of forestry and logging all of our trails can be more sustainable for future use so that we can go back and reuse those trails yeah and they won't have the same issues that we've our facebook in past yeah yeah it's exciting um developing dates for standard access you know in a particular region or having um like we talked about the educational opportunities for users to be introduced to to the features that are that are restricting their use oh I didn't scroll down I must have so then one of the last things is to establish maintenance teams or however you do it I don't know who can perform repairs or who can manage user access which you've already talked about but you've got environmental impacts like water quality and you also have habitat issues such as nesting birds or wildlife offspring things like that that can be easily disturbed by bicycle traffic and one person going through a trail is not a problem 10 people going through the trail probably isn't a problem either but if there's a doe or a fawn and every single time a bicycle comes through she's alerted that's that's not her normal pattern and so you're you're introducing something different to her even if she doesn't run you're creating a discomfort for her um and the same thing goes for nesting birds um some of the large wild wildlife will leave the area and come back because they can travel so much territory but once that user group starts to increase there's um this is an issue I didn't bring into the conversation but it just popped in my mind is it like a lot of people a lot of times we'll we'll use the term in forestry mimicking natural processes but if you're mimicking natural processes you're taking away the opportunity for nature to do what you just did so if you cut down trees because you don't want them to get blown over the next windstorm comes in and blows over more trees or it doesn't have trees to blow over so finding ways that the use can leave an opportunity for the natural environment to to perform its normal function so alerting a doe 10 times in the morning this is not a fact I'm just using as an example is is an example of of how that use can be discriminated so if there's somebody who rides through and they see the doe in the fawn maybe there's a way that they can let people know that that's maybe not a best trail to ride on the day or something but it's it's another opportunity for people to you don't have to necessarily see the doe and the fawn to get the experience if you know that the fawn's there and that's a good reason not to ride the trail today it it's part of your ethic it's a development of the ethic so that's one more quote the last slide that's he was my uncle but not in the park not a well the important person but really makes a lot of sense so that's that's part of the environment the ecological integrity is what how can I get what I need or want from the environment without creating a situation that I have to start to manage because once I start managing it it's no longer the natural setting that it was and we're not so so that's the end of my talk yeah yeah discussion concerns have come up for you and from your perspective as you've seen this rapid growth of trail development and trail users um I think that it hasn't I haven't seen a public presentation of of the ethic like this yeah it's just that I wonder you know I don't know how many people riding on any of these trails I haven't been on very many of them so I don't know and um and it you know I think that what I have seen is sort of more of an advertisement approach to we have bicycle trails and biking in Vermont's back country is a is a great opportunity and so the next part of that there's another paragraph that or two that can go on that in public that's so that's really in terms of being in the woods I haven't seen any I mean I've I've seen some of the trails that Thatcher's built which he does a great job and I've seen some of the trails that Zach's building and so I don't have a problem with the trails I have a problem with the managing the use so I have no doubt the trails are being built beautifully I always come back to the fact that probably a lot of people have heard this you know you know Vermont's within a day's drive of 60 million people so as the popularity of all the recreational activities the even the hiking biking yeah e-biking um and then throwing ATVs and yes keeps building building building on the pressure so what do we do about the volume what do we do about the volume of traffic yeah what do we do about that and wildlife especially wildlife I mean I think you can probably keep the trails in good shape you can probably avoid the erosion and all that but what do you do about the effect on worse yeah that's where you know the the authenticity of the organizations that are promoting the use has to come to bear I mean you have to be able to say that this is this is too many people but it's it's because it's so much there's so much variability it's very hard to measure but I I know that when I walk through the woods and see a deer oftentimes she's not alarmed but I've seen skiers go by deer and and and my horses as well they just freak out because of the speed that they're traveling so and they don't have to necessarily freak out a lot it's just this is not part of their environment sorry um somehow us developing some sensitivity more sensitivity to the fact that there's a community here so for an example you you know you go to Paris France and you go walk into a bistro and there's a whole bunch of people sitting around they're all speaking French do you don't you just start yelling English out maybe in 2020 you do but but but but you probably you don't really so but then why do you go into the forest with no sensitivity to the community that's there you know it's like I don't know what that community is well then you know even more reason to be gentle I think that's a great point and this is a good um uh transition into the US Forest Service I'm gonna go to the back yeah the US Forest Service did a the IR the Robinson IRP uh review and monitoring uh of the branding gap back-country ski zone that our club built out we got approval for in 2015 um and we're joining outdoor collective then across the um built out four different back-country ski zones on the Green Mountain National Forest on branding gap and the there I think are two or three of the Rangers and one of the biologists Jeremy Mears um was the lead on this and earlier this winter uh they presented this at the Mad River Valley I'm sorry Mad River uh all over the place um MRBBC Mad River Valley Backcountry Coalition they presented their findings and I think it it speaks to what we are trying to to figure out as trail users trail builders conservationists um and environmentalists like what are these impacts so so this little about 15 minute video shows the findings of what they found on monitoring at the branding gap and I think it's really awesome so let me get it up here and see if we can hold on let me just try and get might take me saying collecting information and about flooring fauna to help understand the potential impacts of the back-country zones in that area you'll be be presenting on that we also have Greg White from the Ridge lineup uh president from the Ridge lineup like we'll be here also and we'll speak a little bit after Jeremy's presentation about a rock's perspective and their approach community so with that I'm I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and Jeremy I would ask that you then you can go ahead and share yours all right we'll give it a try great you can see it I can see it and I'm gonna mute myself now thank you fantastic okay hi my name is Jeremy Mears I'm the district biologist for the Rochester middlebury ranger district so I'm here to talk to you today about the work we've been doing in Brandon and Chittenden um Chittenden Brook and branding gap trying to figure out what's going on with the backcountry ski zones and the proposed backcountry ski zones um my information's on the screen right now if you have any questions after um please feel free to reach out that's my actual cell phone so um limited to times that are reasonable but uh uh yes I'll just get on with it so what got us here so um there are two projects that really led to the monitoring in Brandon gap um the first was the trial backcountry ski zone project that was signed in 2015 um and really implemented after that and is fully implemented now that's the Brandon backcountry ski zones um the three areas ocean barebrook and no name it's about 200 acres of backcountry skiing um that project went through um people saw that the public had some concerns about what the effects of that backcountry use was um so when we moved to the next project which was the robinson irp integrated resource project that was signed in 2018 and had a proposed new backcountry ski area in Chittenden Brook um members of the public asked us to monitor what effects could potentially be happening as a result of the backcountry skiing before we actually implement um those projects um the Chittenden Brook projects did stay in the decision documents so they are they are still NEPA they just have been on it have not been implemented pending the outcomes of this work so this is roughly the area I apologize for the terrible map I am not a GIS map person I am a I go to documents and steal maps from other folks so what you can see here on the left is the existing um uh branding app ski zones they're in yellow like I said these are fully implemented um this is a project that is no additional work is happening here if you look on the right side of the screen you see the purple areas which are the proposed ski zones that are in Chittenden Brook um these equal something in the neighborhood of 250 acres um that could be potentially developed as we move forward um so the state of objective of the project we had to um in the decision for Robinson we added monitoring to the NEPA so we have to monitor we are statutorily required to monitor um and the objective was to monitor moose and black bear abundance and evaluate the potential impacts to these species for backcountry stereo management use um and specifically we're looking at what's happened at Brandon Gap using Chittenden Brook as a control and then thinking about what that means for Chittenden Brook moving forward um additionally with this I added another control site that it will be explained better as I move forward through the slides um so as we drill down into that a little closer the goals of the study were to compile statistics on moose um create relative abundance relative abundance indices um and do the same thing for black bear um then compare the information we have from Brandon Gap to Chittenden Brook because we're also collecting camera data there um and I also created an off trail camera transect in Brandon Gap to complement the on trail so we had more areas to look at to compare and finally you know the piece was to use the information we get to think about how we move forward with Chittenden so the areas highlighted red obviously the same um terrible map I used before but this gives you an idea of where my sample areas were from 2017 till 2020 and I should say that we're continuing to keep this monitoring going for the foreseeable future it's just a really great wealth of knowledge to think about what's going on in relation to these activities so as far as my staff time I'm pretty much considering this is a project we're going to keep going with for the foreseeable future until there's a reason to stop um so the piece on the left that is that um the sample area that's an off trail sample area in Brandon Gap um the yellow area that circled that's the no name ski zone that's where we had cameras on the trails and obviously the purple area that's circled down on the right that's the the furthest west Chittenden Brook um proposed ski zone areas um to think about the sampling that we did we did camera trap transect sampling um so we had 18 cameras total in the three areas um each sample area has six cameras um placed in an elevational gradient going from the highest point of the transect at 200 foot intervals going down the slope and at some areas we did replicates to kind of see what we are what we're missing with those cameras to get an idea of air um we also randomized the direction the cameras are facing within those areas so that we get um we're not getting effects of bias of where we're looking um sample period is the entire year these cameras are out all year round um my staff and myself go out on a somewhat of a schedule basically weather dependent and swap cards batteries bring the data back and start crunching numbers um as of right now the set 2017 to 2021 half hour to 2020 has been analyzed there's more data to add to this data set it's just a matter of time to get the put it all together so in terms of what we found we're seeing a lot of really interesting information about all the species we get up in Brandon gap in Chittenden Brook um you know moose and black bear are the two species we're interested in they are not the most abundant species we run into that's by far white till deer that use those areas heavily um but we get a lot of information on other species that are using that you know not only the areas that aren't currently ski zones but the ski zones too so other species are also using them we haven't crunched those numbers but you know other things to look at as we move forward and again you know moose we got 40 black bear we got 40 so we haven't we don't have a lot of detections but what we do have is detections at almost every camera in the sample area so um i calculated something called realized occupancy which basically means how many cameras did the species of interest shop in and for black bear it was about 80 percent of the cameras detected black bear and for moose was about 89 percent so they're really found throughout the sample area um to drill down into the numbers a little more closely we can focus on moose um and what this is is all years data 2017 to 2020 a total sample collection of 40 for moose and looking at what months of the year that species was detected and what we begin to see is that there's some seasonality to when we're finding moose um kind of an important thing to think about with the january and february samples are that these were actually detections in periods of low snow we don't tend to see moose moving on the landscape when there's a lot of snow on the ground they're just not moving around occasionally we'll see areas where they've really vetted in hard in the woods but we just don't see them moving actively throughout the deep snow areas in brandy gavage and in brook um so we have the same information for bear and you can see the same seasonality obviously bear our dormant for a large portion of the time when skiing is active um we expected this this isn't a surprise in any way shape or form um you know as climate chains move forward we might see some more that the shoulders increase some but um we see strong seasonal use that um really suggests that it's obviously the non snow periods or the deep snow periods that we're just not seeing the bear out there um what we can do now is take the skier numbers so this is the data of skier use in the no-name ski zones and it's for the three years of that we actually recorded data there so 2018, 2019, and 2020 um over those three years there were 1756 detections of skiers in that particular ski zone um some skiers can get double counted in this so that number is likely a little higher than what is actually there um but it gives you an idea of when the use is when we're seeing the heaviest use of the ski zones which is you know really beginning of end of january through february to march we see a lot of activity um and then by april we're pretty much done there's a few stragglers that come through you see people skiing the hardback but in general um you know after the powder is gone you don't see a lot of activity um same happens for november december we just see a real decrease in the number of people who are using it this is skier specific this is in all people so you'll see a smatter you have other folks using the ski lines and off-country trail areas as well which you know we we have hunters we have hikers um hunters actually have popped up a lot in the ski zones in um recent images interesting so if we take the moose, black bear and skier information and put that together in one graph we can kind of think about um when we have the highest number of skiers and when we have the highest number of detections of moose and black bear in our areas um and what we see again is that strong seasonal difference um and you know one of our concerns is um is the movement of are we seeing skiers push animals out of our areas of concern and if you look at that you could interpret it that way looking at this graph but the reason we chose the other two control areas that were not ski zones we're looking to see if you have the same seasonal patterns suggesting that we see this pattern in all areas not just the ski zones um and if we drill down into the data I know this is a lot of numbers on the next screen and I'll just explain it you don't have to look through them all okay there was there wasn't your signal got dropped so I'm going to skip ahead to where he comes back in um Brad I see the concerns about firm roads and things like that jump on the handle would that change the floor on fauna on the understory if you didn't okay I think Jeremy's back but I don't want to interrupt what you're saying well that's right yeah I the only comment I'm concerned I don't know if Jeremy's going to speak to this aspect of it was you know changing the understory and in particular concerns about firm roads and things like that and and we've seen a little bit of that in some of the areas um but up in the most part it um it's most of how probably yeah I can definitely agree with that and I'm not going to speak to the flora tonight we're going to stick with fauna but we are continuing to collect vegetation data as a continuation of a university study that was there and great spot on we don't I mean there is some conversion to fern but I think the the large concerns aren't panning out as much as the hobble bush really dominates that landscape um and you know it's amazing how quickly the that area re-vegetates if it's not actively managed so I'm going to try to jump back into my presentation real quick hopefully it works and I don't disappear again can you see it now all right well so um I pretty much gone through this which was to say that we're not seeing a lot of seasonal difference between Chittendenbrook which is a control brand agape off trail which is a control and brand agape on trail we're seeing similar patterns of usage of both both moose and black bear throughout the year um what's interesting is that the um the off trail camera site is actually the one where we're seeing the fewest number of animals so you know as we're creating these feeding lanes at the mountain we're seeing a lot of ungulates moose deer really heavily browsing these areas probably contributing to the you know maybe saving some gas in terms of the some of the triggers as they go up they'll um so you know again this is just going to break down what I said before there's strong seasonal separation between one's gears and using the mountain and one moose and black bear are active um there are no bear declines and moose or black bear in the ski zones there seems to be rendered patterns and fluctuations in the numbers but nothing suggests you know a steady decline in numbers again we've been looking at this for four years um as we look at it for more we may detect the pattern but as it stands now it looks very random in terms of the numbers we're detecting um we I think Greg was speaking to this when the snows there these areas are incredibly popular we see thousands of users using these places annually um like I said 1756 detections in that one line of the known zone alone um so you can kind of expand that to the three different areas um because I mean uh yeah there's a lot of people up there um and what goes before when people see the dogs I know they're going to get worried but what I do see a lot of them with the skiers is people with dogs off leash so I think it's worth bringing it up and it's something I'm going to you know look at more closely we have no evidence that there are there's dogs harassing wildlife on the mountain and I'm not suggesting that all I'm saying is that we see thousands of people skiers up there and hundreds of dogs so white tail deer is the most abundant wildlife species we have up there the two most abundant detections we have are humans and dogs those are really what we're getting most of on our cameras other than really snowy nights that show up on the cameras too when they trick the uh motion sensors so you know what do we do moving forward oh correct me I almost went through the whole thing we're not showing you the pictures of the star other things you've detected so this is an animal we picked up in Chittenden Ruck um very healthy um this is we haven't seen in the images we picked up in all of the areas we the animals tend to be in good condition um and this is just for the next photos are just for one site and you can see how many different species are using a warm particular zone this is one camera's trapping sample period um just about three months three or four months um one site multiple species over the course of over that sample period so we're seeing lots of careers out there um this is Chittenden Ruck we see similar results in um branding gap so nothing just suggests that things are moving away in fact we're seeing kind of the opposite we're seeing more animals using the you know this particularly in the shoulder seasons when there's a snowpack um in branding gap um animals are using that hard pack to move up and down through the forest because it's essentially an easy path to move through the area um so what we're going to do moving forward is continuing monitoring in all three sample areas um like I said I want to keep doing this for the foreseeable future because it's a wealth of knowledge do you think about what the impacts from skiing are and how we continue to develop that country skiing it's something that's not going away um and people love it so we want to continue to support that um activity and do our good diligence to make sure that we're keeping an eye out for any potential negative impacts um the next three points two through five are recommendations I put to our line officer the district ranger Chris Mattrick these are not set in stone these are things that we're discussing as part of moving forward with the proposed Chittenden Ruck um trail development and my first um recommendation was to use the staggered approach to developing the ski zone so there are I believe six areas that are proposed from Chittenden Ruck um what I've asked told Chris in my as my recommendation is to develop a couple of these that are the furthest from the road that will probably get the least amount of activity because they require the most effort to get to them and then we'll continue to monitor that for effects um there's a substantial amount of timber harvest in that area too so we're um so myself I'm a little bit shy about all of the activity that's going on in there not putting too many stressors on the ground um as we go forward with building those ski zones um trying to keep an eye on fragmentation so where we can um keep ski zones compact um keep them compact meaning you know not separate trails for up tracks um into the into the group events yet but it's it's a great idea I'm sure it would be great even yeah even just locally right around town with younger kids you know take kids on bike tours absolutely you know some of the trails that are easily accessible and teaching them to get go you know like all right here's this and that yeah what to be aware of and how to treat this and that yeah I think the more eyes the more ears that we can have on this stuff um the message will spread farther and faster um and that's kind of one of the reasons that I I was chatting Carl about this and it's a good time with you know going into summer and and things are beginning to to get going again and folks are going outside and stuff so hopefully this night has been a little bit helpful in shedding some some lights and some inspirational points to for you for you guys to take and and share and carry on and and tread lightly and leave no trace


Do not say she can to cook Say instead she can cook Do not say they can singing Say instead they can sing Do not say he can swims Say instead he can swim Do not say I can play the guitar Say instead I can play the guitar Do not say we can to help Say instead we can help Do not say can you skiing? Say instead Can you ski to learn more about this topic see video at link? Or check out our websites for more free English learning resources eslgold.com and free English study calm


So, as you can see, we ran out of qualified and competent people to do the speaker announcement, so you have to cope with me now. It is my pleasure to announce Michael Dexter speaking about things I don't understand. I'm going to learn something. I hope you're going to learn something too. Have fun. Thank you, Michael. Henning. How are you doing? So, hello. My name is Michael Dexter. The full official title of my talk is the free BSD build option OpenZFS. We have compatlinux and jail.conf nexus where all of these intersect and in general about how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts with these. But I think my key goal is to get you out of your food coma and conference coma from four wonderful days and to leave you with ideas and inspirations for the coming weeks, months and years. I will rant at times, but I hope to wrap it up nicely. So thank you for your patience. My very first conference talk was at EuroBSD Constrasberg 2008. I have colleagues to blame for nudging me into it, twisting my arm. And my themes have been virtualization, multiplicity, you name it. And in many of these talks, I've talked about building blocks, be it the monitoring that might go with such systems, be it storage, be it smart monitoring utilities and all these little bits that slowly come together towards a greater whole. I am 49, 95 years old and it's better late than never to kind of bring some of these parts together that I've been talking about for about 14 years.  And I will turbo through some topics because they came up over and over from the keynote onward and in this room with many of the talks about jails and such. So I'm so glad to see that people are thinking like-mindedly. That is inspiring. And so as with any proper talk, I've been working on this until the very last minutes. I've shifted a few things accordingly to accommodate breaking news, including software developed today. So, I want to talk about five key points, the importance of standards and compliance with them, the power of explain it to me like I'm five, the power of owning the stack and virtualizing the rest, the Venn diagram from hell, this should be fun, and BSD used to the rescue as their wonderful new things across the different platforms and you will get some thanks out of this good man. So, I will put on a different hat that many of you have never seen over all these years of conferences. Putting on my SNEA storage networking industry association data protection and privacy committee hat, the committee is working on updating a best practices white paper. Yes, three, two, one backups are a good thing, but things are getting a little more complicated and formalized, which I'll touch on in a sec. The committee gets involved with working on standards and seeing how the sausage is made and that is a fascinating process and I'll touch on what it looks like and how you can get involved. And I do promote things like ZFS at the event, which some attendees have major issues with the rampant layering violations and open ZFS, but it's a very useful tool for a number of purposes that I'll touch on later, so we can sort of have nice things. Now, in the course of this participation, leafing through, I found this text, which is the software development guidelines for the organization as a public benefit organization where actually it's a vendor organization, but people leave their guns at the door and hopefully develop sane standards. In developing reference implementations, point six here, in general, commercially-friendly software licenses such as BSD are preferred as inbound and outbound licenses, and I'm like, I had that Jurassic Park moment, wait, this is a Unix system, I know Unix, this is BSD. You're speaking my language in the least likely environment. So I took that to heart and I do what I normally do is quickly give a talk on the subject, so I did a talk a few years back on by the book. Here are open source and key point production ready reference implementations of these technologies and terms. So the organization publishes its own, the LTFS format for tape format, NDMP, which hasn't quite gotten the love it deserves. Redfish, Swordfish, OpenIPI type management, it's getting some traction. But in the course of that, obviously, they're the RFCs that run the internet and run everything we do. There's NFS, there's ISCAS, there's Fibre Channel, and it's just a long list of just open standards. And I'll get into the role of those in BSD things. So has anyone been involved with standards development? No, no? Okay, go ahead, can't blame you. Oh, I see a hand in back. Which standards have you worked on? Architecture standards, excellent. So I work mostly with storage and on the theme I'll get to of owning the stack. I really want to own the stack such that I want high quality part, partitioning GPT, partitioning tools across the board on every OS. And they are stunningly bad once you start comparing them. And the matrix I get if not here, it's like it is scary bad. So in an act of desperation, I looked at the spec. It's like, what's going on there? Let's take a quick little peek at it. And it's a great computer science refresher. It's actually delightful. And there are words like reserve, which is your friends, which means do nothing. So in storage, most things are like a really long number, like a ruler. You start at zero and you go up to offsets. And in meters, a few meters in, you do something. A few meters in, from there you do something else.  A few shims, we say EFI part. So just blast in a few characters that are those characters literally lined up in various forms of Indian, this big Indian, little Indian binary. And I found that you can punch those in there with a combination of printf and dd and just start building up a partition table. Step one, validating a table. You start here, hop over, hop over some more. Reserved, hop over, you just increment a number from like 512 to plus 18 or to jump ahead. So I hope to share some tools that are just a simple little CS education on just stepping through this scary mystery of partitioning that vendors handle and third party software handles, but the spec is actually really straightforward.  But in looking at the spec, you find things like typos. The official spec has simple typos in it and is ambiguous about Indianness and other stuff. So as many of you who just have an itch and jump into projects, well, there are opportunities that are remarkably low hanging fruit for standards that everyone in this room and this building in the city use. Everything is GPT partitioned at this point except for a few embedded devices. Maybe the little flash recorder on my audio recorder here. So this stuff matters and the barriers of entry aren't always that big. Naturally, some standards are goofy. I don't know if anyone in the room has any opinions on IPv6, but some standards need refresh and love and really careful thinking before they're implemented. So standards range from ad hoc to strict. Validation tools are rather important and sometimes they're plentiful. Sometimes they're absolutely absent. Hopefully there's a one-to-one relationship between standard and the tools to check it and that tool is accessible and affordable. And you just test the darn thing as you develop it. That's what I thought and continuous validation is important. As a community NVMe developer pointed out, the test suite for the NVMe spec is the price of a medium sized luxury car per year. Hopefully there are discounts for organizations and it's a key role for the foundations to play is hop in and say, hey look, we want to provide the best implementations. And for the record, for a while possibly to this day, the beehive NVMe emulation spec was the only available software implementation to pass all tests. Well, so someone's doing something, right? But if those tests are not accessible, we are limited in our progress. So, as for compliance, has anyone heard of the ISO 27040 spec? Security in storage, the refresh will arrive in October. And a great many industries will be subject to it. So it touches on things such as what to do in case of data breaches and organizational controls and people controls and physical controls and two factor authentication and removing software that shouldn't be there. Because, hey, it's a threat vector. So get ready for that, watch for it, you've been warned. It's probably a good thing and it's a shame so many industries have been flying blindly without guidance. And it's wild out there. And one shocker to me was that there are no universities that teach storage. Perhaps this one does, I sure hope if you look at most universities, they talk about storage ethics and privacy. No, how about SAS fabrics and record sizes and all that? So shifting gears to another point, there is a power of ELI-5, explain it to me like I'm five or 50 as the case may be. So I believe it originated in the US version of the office, no comment. And prior to that, Albert Einstein said if you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself. And there is a natural education nature to all things BSD, be it back to Berkeley, be it to this very event in this university. And there's a role for all of us in this education. So the tools themselves can literally have typos. They can literally be a bit complex or ambiguous. But it's the documentation that surrounds them that needs countless love. They need translations and literally anything you can do to help out with that both locally and globally is appreciated. Bless their hearts, my SQL had the 15 minute rule that you could set the thing up in about 15 minutes and show you that you're punching data in for your boss and he's like, we'll use this. Yes, it just go away, make it work. So discovery is always a challenge in free software, finding a feature. I mean, the classic in Microsoft terms was people requesting features that are already in the software, well, they failed at discovery. And in that is a lot of mentorship, find local and global mentorship like this very event to help communicate all these wonderful things we have to offer. It's a very non-technical function in many ways. Please don't confuse the need for a technical solution to non-technical problems, please, please, please, please, please. And so in the BSD circles, well, we have our OS and ports. Well, maybe there and docs. Maybe there's another layer to that that's needed, be it solutions, policies or something where the wisdom of the team can be brought into things like a bit. Like turnkey linux where they have sets of functionality and an appliance that is all standard off the shelf stuff, but it's just supplanted with a little wisdom and a little attention to detail. So shifting gears once again, owning the stack, I'll explain what that means. So if it's proprietary, you can't fix it. Full start, I realize that in the 90s, but how to actually achieve that is a challenge, unfortunately. The fewer repos you have, the fewer rat holes you have, in my opinion. Appliances are exciting, I've spent ten years with one, but enough time spent with an appliance allows you to cut right through it and actually find that the appliance is a barrier to getting a job done. And I like scripting. I find that if the operating system has all the hooks to do things with the logical syntax and things as simple as return values on everything. I've been advocating for a test that IF config can simply report if an interface exists, nothing more, nothing less. Not parse all the output and send it to Dev and I'll just yes or no. Is it there? And main tools get that right, fortunately. And things like I virtualized the rest pun intended. If your REST API is bigger than your OS, maybe just from a sheer bug count perspective alone, you're kind of off the rails. And so when it comes to owning a stack, our choices are the BSDs, Illumos, maybe some of the independent stuff. I guess Google has a new OS. I do not know if we'll all be proudly using it ten years from now. Couldn't tell you, but I know where we are here and now. So next step, the Venn diagram from hell. Yeah, I'll need it, you need it. So, my fancy graphics. If you squint and look at the phone in your pocket, my little travel router, a cloud server, a PBX used in the university, this contraption that runs all that, you name it, you squint, you see a Unix kernel. It's like, Unix one, it's like, this is great. We totally took over the world, except for a few little minor things. So, I don't know, NetApp with a proprietary file system or 1FS. Okay, they do their thing, little secret sauce, they do their thing. ASICs, especially network hardware. It's like, oh, it's running Linux, BSD, you name it, but then there's the actual chip that is a switching and then that's under NDA, ouch, ouch, ouch. Maybe a pretty gooey, maybe a command line route, Cisco-like interface, you name it, GPUs, wow, pain and suffering there, and of course support. Well, we won, but we didn't, we didn't, we didn't. So you've got all these collections of things we use every day with Unix, that we all help make. You in this room helped produce, but we're now like trapped by them. Okay, so in practice we have these venture capital funded appliances, like let's say, let's make a new router. They're virtually all GPL violating, rarely are they updated, it's inconsistent. Sometimes it's really consistent to a point that, well, you pay very clearly for the right to update your software. Support varies, I've had clients say wait, please don't take away the old model three par or something, the support was great.  Naturally they're expensive because the motivation is the money. And often, especially in storage, they're just setting up for either the IPO or the acquisition by, in the case of storage, by DDN or Dell EMC, and it's like wait, we not only won, the solutions are there, but we're not like benefiting, it's a little frustrating. So I don't think that Richard Stallman sat on his mountaintop and thought the future of software freedom is venture capital funded, unsupported, GPL violating, unupdated devices that will go out of date and switch off on you. It's like I don't think that's what they meant, I couldn't find that paragraph in the GNU manifesto or the open source definition or any of that. So is this what we asked for? And the cloud only compounds this.  And computer science, yeah, going from like Pascal to C to Java to Python to JavaScript to Azure credentials. Like wait, hold on, that's not quite what we signed up for. And again, not a single school teaches storage on planet Earth. So you've probably heard this feel good comment from Theodorat. Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because of Unix. We love Unix. Now, there's one level that would just feel good. Then there's a terrifying level, which is that what happens when a whole bunch of bitter Windows haters who aren't familiar with Linux start developing products that are venture capital funded and black boxes and all that. You get this whole momentum of like, no, no, no, stop, stop, stop, please. Don't drive the industry with that. Anyone worked with command.com on a Windows machine? It's like, it is a command line. And it's like someone described it over the phone. It's like, yeah, you can enter commands and you can do stuff in a file name. It's like, okay, I'll implement that. And then we get this mess we work with every day. So case in point, open GPU. So AMD probably opened up. Oh, great. We'll share our cards and our interfaces and all that. And you can do SRIOV.  Well, they have a repo that hasn't been updated since like 2019. There's one person who has updated it and made it work with like eight commits ahead of upstream. Bless his heart. Whoever this cost bar is, thank you. But that shouldn't be necessary. When someone proudly announces an open GPU initiative and all that, this crap doesn't work. Maybe the pandemic played a role, but hey, we're pretty late in that game. And increasingly, if you want the future of this back with these cards, the cloud vendors get them. High-end servers have them for a fee for the license to go with the card. You just said open. Where did we go wrong? The other one is all these open networking routers like white box routers or ON, you can get the Dell, ON variation with all these Marvel reference implementations and such. Everyone ran Cumulus Linux. Now it's X Cumulus Linux and it's now on the Oni and others. And the open compute project, wow, a big unifying project came together and produced the software and you go to the released versions.  But yeah, how did we get here? Is it the old habits die hard? The capitalists just have to screw everything, even when they get the framework of the orgs and the open standards and the GitHub and whatever, correct? That's very frustrating. And now here's the just stab. The BSE appliances, be it PFSense, OpenSense, whatever, OpenBSD itself, whatever, they're better at GPL compliance than the GPL based products. They have no obligation, but they're better at developing in the open, sharing in the open and just like, okay, so what do we do about this? First off, I'll say hardware always plays a critical role. You have to like boot stuff. You need like switches with open ASICs you can interface with. The foundations, all of them need to be first in line before the vendor is interfacing with that new nifty GPU. They will probably have software faster than a vendor and the vendors are claiming they're open. Well, just keep at their door pounding on it. Please, I beg of you. And the foundations need to be there before the cloud vendors. There are some success stories, but we're still like hurting and losing. And question for you, what does a secure web-based management API look like for a Unix system? Because it's been reinvented a thousand times and they're all still kind of limited. Maybe we can come together and think about that as a group. I don't know. I, for one, love scriptability of a well-thought-out system because the hard part's done. You do the easy part and you make it work to meet your needs. And I still wonder about what a web GUI properly looks like that Theo would be happy with. So the ultimate question here, can we have nice things? BSD is hopefully to the rescue because I don't think we'd be in this room if we didn't believe that. So to their credit, and your credit, literally in the room here, credit, like decades of production quality open standard implementation. The BSD networking stack has, for the most part, run the internet from day one, and that's a good thing. And if you were to break that standard, you wouldn't participate on the internet. That's kind of required that you actually behave with regard to the rules. Decades of ties to academia as we sit here in a university, that's great. We've got to communicate what's available, what can be done. It's good for your career. It's good for your mind. Consistency is great. The BSD standout is just where, if a command works one way in one corner of the system, it probably works similarly another corner of it. The virtualization options are growing rapidly, be it VMM on OpenBSD, and VMM and Hacksam on NetBSD, Beehive on FreeBSD, and all that. And then, and the progress is coming along nicely, so let's shift gears one last time into very technical things. So PF, the human readable firewall, that is what success looks like. OpenSSH ships in Windows. You go to Options, and you can have like the Solitaire and OpenSSH and pick from a list. That's success. That is victory. Olivier with FreeBSDRP and FreeNAS, it's like, well, it does not pretend not to be the underlying OS. It simply adds some tools to make it streamlined and friendly. And all of these have their rough edges, and I know them well, but hey, PF sends an open sense. Well, they're doing a concerted effort to say, this is a preconfigured BSD with a GUI, nothing more, nothing less. Some, often with a hardware play, which you gotta boot stuff, that's cool. Just don't make it too proprietary, please. And so, one thing that has really, really stood out for me, and has kept me very busy for years now, is the build options in FreeBSD. Is anyone in the room familiar with build options in FreeBSD? Four hands? Five hands? Okay, good, about eight hands. Thank you very much. So, let's get our feet wet with them. So, if you go to the mansource.com manual page, you will see the list of the explained with and without switches, and you can turn stuff on, turn it off. And some OSes will say, you never want to do that because that should be the one thing all the time. I'm like, yes, yes, yes, yes, I get it. But, what really stood out to me is that, it's like, well, there's without jail. Well, let's forget about the underlying OS for a moment. It's a nested ABI. And without iSCSI? Well, no, no, no, no. We're talking actually without RFC 3720. It's an implementation of that RFC, and it's a pretty good one. And it can be turned on or off as you build the OS. Some of them are libc-level, and that's pretty intrusive. Some of them, and now combined with, say, reproducible builds, means that you can turn stuff off. The remaining things are identical, hopefully, to the shipped release OS, and it's still the OS. It's just less of it. I'll probably hit that point later. But to me, that's a toy chest of open standards. And you start with nothing and just add the ones you want, and things get kind of fun doing that. So, for years, I discovered them in like 2003, the moment I discovered jail, thinking, this is great. How do I cut everything down? Well, those options have been broken for decades. And I've been begging, encouraging, pleading that they get fixed.  Now, in celebration of this event, someone went and broke three branches of them. So I'm working to find out tools to make that absolutely and institutionally CI tested so that doesn't happen again, because I'm finally able to do cool things with these. So there's a talk of package based on FreeBSD. They are a similar goal. They achieve different things. Hopefully that will happen also, because that allows for that similar modularity. I personally test them every time a snapshot arrives from FreeBSD. And when you remove everything in the OS and you don't build Clang and LLVM, you build quite quickly. Like on this laptop I'm presenting from, like under five minutes. The whole OS in a bootable sense, a state. And some of you may have heard of my little OccamBSD project. I've completely refactored it the last few days, and it's available on GitHub, which I'll have a link to later. But just for those who aren't aware, there are 234 options as of 13.1. There was from Paul Henning Kemp, the build option survey, which would step through each option and build the OS with or without that component. That would take a week or two. And I am not worried about without VI breaking. It's a VI text editor. You can build without it, and I'm not losing sleep over that. So that is not a great approach. It's out there if you want to just poke at it, and then you slam the electricity into that. So I've been working with a light option, which enables one, two, three required options required to build the rest without them, and you get to exercise all the make options and find out what someone broke this week. So late last night at the event, a social event I cornered Lee when the cluster testing was free BSD, and hopefully we'll have some official tests in really soon. And hopefully people will start testing all of these before commit. So I hope I'm not the only one who cares about these. And of course you can interrupt me with any questions anytime. But I will tie this up, rest assured. That's where you can find it. It lets you pair down free BSD to without compression, ZFS rooted 240 megabytes with an actual log-inable system. And one fun thing there is that I thought the result would be unrecognizable once you got the thing. It's like, I don't know, BSD44. It's like, wait, in college I sat down to this, but it's that plus ZFS, which is kind of cool, thank you very much. So if you've ever tried, I don't know if anyone's tried Occam BSD in here, but now I let you keep the binaries because you're probably sending to different places and now send to an external hard drive if you want. Just, hey, I'm trying to make it more user-friendly. But five minutes to get through a build world, which means that for any kind of regression testing, you name it, especially regression testing and bisection. Five minutes rocks compared to like 40 minutes. So I've now done a configuration file for lack of a better term where I simply out-specify the build options, the kernel modules, the kernel options in BSD kernel configuration terms, and the devices where, yep, you need like a PCI device to boot, you need a few things to literally boot the system, and then it's whatever you want on top of that. By default, there's no networking. Well, if you want to say be a student and learn an OS, I suggest you start with the very smallest core of the OS, the stuff that absolutely has to be there as opposed to the gigs upon gigs of other stuff. And again, the complaint that, oh, if you change anything, it's not free BSD. Well, with reproducible builds coming along, that binary might be identical to the standard release, just it happens to be only that binary, not a whole bunch of other stuff. So in support of such a thing, OpenZFS, love it or hate it, a point I've been emphasizing in the SNEA circles is that read-only and unmounting is free of charge.  You can have fine-grained like selective free of charge, unmounting, unmounting, read-only in the era of ransomware. I mean, I want my system to react to a hostile threat and go read-only in an instant, and if it's really hostile, just vanish, unmounted, and let that storm pass. Are we doing that? I have not seen that implemented, but that's one of those tools in this tool chest that get really exciting for guys like me. Native encryption. We can argue separately about layers of things on file system, but that's exciting. It has a few bugs that they're working on. It's institutional. And when it comes to compliance with things like 27.040 and all these regular story compliances, well, encryption is one of those big old check boxes. So having it absolutely fully institutionalized is your friend. And one thing I absolutely love in this thing is delegated permissions. Since the 90s, when I first spun up my own web server on the internet and self-hosted, since then, how do you back it up? You don't want root access in any way remotely, but having snapshots of the file system travel out the door as an unprivileged user, even though it's root-level content, is great in my book. So I personally think OpenZFS is a great regulatory compliance tool. Love it or hate it. And compared to, say, proprietary options, I'd rather be in these circles. I have a few talks out there that aren't too hard to find if you're curious about such things. Moving on, there are hypervisors coming out of the walls right now on the BSDs. And there have been a number talked about this week. Again, own the stack from that disk partitioning on up and virtualize the rest. In Beehive Circles, my number one request, hire VCPU accounts so that you can truly have isolated build environments, throw all your cores in a VM, run a future version of the OS, and build it efficiently. John Baldwin's doing great on that, bless his hark. You can go check out my talk on isolated build environments. Again, the building blocks to get to where we should be to not be in this vicious circle of hell of these proprietary appliances. In reducing the host OS, you can approach a type 1 hypervisor insofar as the OS is tiny and things are handled by Viet containers and virtual machines. That's been a narrative since Popek and Goldberg explained it in 64. So that's desirable. You can shift resources to a VM. And one neat trick is, yeah, one neat trick is dev control. Anyone use it on free BSD? You can live strip off PCI devices. And quite a few of them. To a point in my lab, SSHD, and I'm like, I'm going to nuke my VGA, nuke the network, though I could have a serial connection, nuke all of USB, nuke all these components, and then suddenly my PCI list on the hardware looks a lot like a VM PCI list. Audio, get rid of it. And then you can distribute these like candy to virtual machines. That is flexible. That is cool. The computers have done that nifty ways behind the scenes, but you can have it today free of charge. I believe Linux can do that with a special patch. That's nice. They're catching up. That's cool. But, yeah, you can strip off devices. Just say, okay, I'm going to turn off this whole subsystem, and it doesn't panic very often. Another neat feature bringing all these components together from different directions. Beehive has a config file. Finally, the number one requested feature from day one on GPU pass-through for the gamers was the config file. And a neat trick that Jan Brankoff pointed out is that you can slip your own parameters in there that it just ignores. So if you want to add additional metadata for whatever purpose or management into the configuration, just do it. And hopefully this will be the, that's intended to be the platform for all the things you want. Be it JSON, YAML, other higher level stuff. Well, we had to start low level. That's what they did, as opposed to one high level format that no one could agree on. So, that's exciting. As came up in a talk earlier, the Linux compatibility in FreeBSD is becoming quite usable. Yes, it has its constraints to this OS I once heard about, CentOS. Have anyone heard of that, Grandpa? That was then, this is now, that whole community has to figure out what their standards are, because even when they have standards, it's like hard to find one. Did OpenBSD rip out Linux Compat and other compats? Yes, we did. We found out that our Linux Compat is compatible to Linux. ABI that Linux isn't compatible to anyone. That, my friend, is the problem with moving targets and that OpenBSD found that their Linux Compat so old that Linux didn't support that subset. Which is, they're all moving targets. Every single thing I've touched on today is a moving target. So, embrace that and focus on tools that accommodate that and make your life easier. And especially tools with muscle memory that last decades and just in the last session there's complaint. Well, why is it Linux is going from IF config to IP? It's like, well, just to find out your IP address is not like a controversial at question. And similarly, Wine and Proton, Wine for Gamers is coming along such that there are not super comprehensive, but usable for some circumstances, options for Windows and Linux compatibility. Now, that puts the onus on us to document them. What works? What doesn't? With no emotion, just here's a test suite that verifies if certain applications run or don't run. And years and years in the making for those using jails, jail.conf.d. You drop a configuration file in a common directory. If it's in there, it gets booted. If it's not, it doesn't. There's a great talk from Mark Atwood about the greatest no SQL database is a file system. It's reliable, it's fast, it's flexible, it's object oriented. There's a whole bunch of things. And there are times that dropping a text file into a directory with heavy lifting meaning is a good thing. I personally prefer that to a massive administration tool built in some funny language. And I just learned this week there are a few bugs to address in it, but I'm talking to them about what if we had nested data sets and you could, using ZFS, make a data set disappear to make a jail disappear. You are using 100% in-base tools to achieve what is often solved with massive lifestyle solutions. I don't like lifestyle solutions. The BSD OS is pick your BSD. In this case, free BSD is the lifestyle, not the stuff you bolt on top of it. I am impressed with Bastille BSD, but there's a comment in the last session, or second to last in this very room, that the virtual machines are driving a bit too much policy up the stack, and that's a good observation. So these conversations have to take place to figure out what is the right and wrong or better and worse solution. I do have a tool that's in its infancy called jail hive, which is a jail with the bare minimum resources to contain a beehive virtual machine. That's what Illumos is doing institutionally. Bless their hearts. In free BSD circles, if you are to use beehive load, which simply calls some Lewis script, you could have a very hostile VM and not know it, and you run it as root and you've got a problem. So I hope VMM on all the platforms are taking precautions there. So a general theme here is the near base tools. The base OS's are great. I mean, that's what it takes a while to appreciate, but you sit down at a BSD and things are consistent. Documentation is consistent, behavior is consistent. So I for one am not sold on the notion of the easy button, the one button solution because the more time you spend with those, the more you just have to drill through to the underlying OS and get the crutch out of the way. Pounded that point repeatedly. The human readability of these mechanical things is critical, and again, that's what PF gets right. It's like, well, where's the web GUI? It's human readable. Where's the web? Just try it. Just sit down. It's like you can get started in a few lines. There are great books out there. Lean into that. I mean, we really have to lean into that on all these components and at the academic level. It's in schools, in your community. You name it. One thing that keeps coming up in this very room this very day is like, well, proper process supervision. If any given BSD needs a proper process supervisor, let's have that discussion. If all of them are terrible in some way, this couldn't... Yes, sir? Five minutes. Five minutes? Oh, I wasn't... Oh, okay. You don't have a process supervisor of choice to propose for inclusion in your base OS. He is a process supervisor. Yes, he is. And I love him for it. So let's have that discussion. So bringing this home in an attempt to inspire your actions coming weeks and months because you will go to somewhere other than Vienna statistically. Please talk to your local communities and figure out what resources are there, how you can help, what schools you can give a talk at, you name it. So to recap those initial points I wanted to cover and instill in you standards and their compliance provide us guidance because if we don't at least start there, we will just end up with anarchy. And when vendors do it, it's painful anarchy and expensive anarchy. The power of explaining it to me like I'm five or 50. This is on all of us and thank you for organizing an event that brings people together. Thank you for whatever you're working on because that's what it looks like. It's a messy, wet-wear process, humans. It's not a technology, it's not a new, you name it, technology. I think you're all here for some visceral understanding of owning a stack. You can fix the OS and contribute at some point. Whatever crazy point you want from the starting at zero GPT partitioning, you jump 512 bytes and 512 more, check it out, it's great, it's awesome. And these features are getting really good. There's a notion of actual genuine Kaizen revision in the BSDs where you just progressively increment and make a little better whereas they are still trying to unify GNU and Linux and someday they will. I see a single task there but others see a thousand tasks there. Bless their hearts. That's fascinating.  So, thank you so much. I'm not sure that was what you were expecting but I hope it leaves you inspired for the coming weeks, months and years. Any questions? Ah, yes. And Paul, we miss you. Maybe rest in peace. I'm easy to find. I guess in our five minutes I can't show you a 240 meg version of FreeBSD booting with ZFS but that will have to wait. Thank you all. Thanks to Michael for the 1000 presentations.