Climbers Strip Forest For Scheduled Autumn

Inti Balogun unclipped his harness on Friday after stripping sixteen hundred white birch branches by hand.

Across the canyon wall of Melas Chasma, thirty-nine other climbers dangled from overhead guide rails to finish the rest of the eighty thousand trees. The grove had failed to shed. A heat pump in the lower cliff face had stuck at eight degrees, four degrees above the threshold the engineered birches needed to drop their canopy. The Colony Calendar Board refused to alter the equinox.

Balogun worked for thirty straight hours with three battery packs, two pairs of grip-mitts, and five plastic buckets.

"The stems fight you," Balogun said. "You have to twist each leaf ninety degrees to the left or the bark tears."

If a branch retains its canopy when the soil chillers start, the sap freezes in the wood and splits the trunk by morning. By dawn, the climbers had cleared forty-two terraces and dumped four tonnes of yellow mulch onto the red dust paths below.

Autumn began at noon.

Fourteen civic administrators walked through the debris on schedule.