Capital High School junior Brenna Fanning was shocked to learn the trees on Stemple Pass, west of Helena, aren't very healthy.

"It's scary how bad everything has gotten," she said. "Everything is pretty much dead or dying. The area we were in was older trees - there are no healthy ones left."

Fanning was one of nearly 50 students in Tom Pedersen's honors biology class who recently spent two days near Gould Creek on the Grady Conservation Easement and Helena National Forest.

They took water samples up- and downstream from an old mining site and inventoried the forest in clear-cut and non-clear-cut areas.

Fanning said many trees didn't have any needles, and most were infested by Western Spruce Budworm. She suggests in her findings that climate changes are a big cause of the problem.

"We've had less hard winters - if we've had a long, strong winter it would help in cleaning them out," she said. "Mild temperatures make more generations reproduce very year."

Pedersen agreed, saying, "It's so hot the trees can't get enough moisture to produce sap to push them out."

The trip was funded through a Department of Environmental Quality grant. Organizer Andrew Jakes said it's the kind of project the agency likes to fund.

"It provides a mechanism for folks on the ground to get some hands-on education and awareness about their local issues towards water and forestry," Jakes said. "It's basically a way for kids to increase awareness about what pollution is, where it comes from and what we can do to help minimize those impacts."

Students looked at chemical, physical and biological data and proposed some reasons for what they found in a graded report.

"If their answer is based on data, there is no right or wrong answer," Pedersen said. "My main goal is to teach kids how to do science on a stream or in a forest, that their data is important, and they can make a difference by understanding the data."

Students tested for dissolved oxygen, pH, vegetation, flow, and macro invertebrates in the water. Junior Matt Podolinsky was pleased to find the water was moderately healthy, he said.

"Streams affect the rest of the environment," he said. "(Streams) go into drainage areas that affect farms, for example, and potentially affect all the other creeks - they affect the whole bigger picture."

Fanning said being outdoors doing science gave her a greater understanding of the subject matter.

"It's one thing to have someone say the climate is changing and why we need to do stuff about it," she said. "It's another to go see everything that's happened. We need to figure something quick because I like the trees."

Reporter Alana Listoe: 447-4081 or alana.listoe@helenair.com