On a sweltering morning deep in the San Gabriel Mountains, Katie VinZant donned work gloves and boots, hoisted a pickax and began bashing alien species.
The 31-year-old botanist enjoys a Sunday in the Angeles National Forest as much as the next person. But when it comes to weeds that have colonized and multiplied since the 2009 Station fire, she's a terminator.
Slender and trim in a T-shirt, grubby pants and tattered straw sombrero, VinZant swiped the sweat stinging her eyes. "I know it sounds crazy," she said, "but I plan to get rid of as many weeds as possible. They don't belong on the landscape."
One plant at a time, one weekend at a stretch, VinZant is helping to weed the 640,000-acre forest that is the playground and backdrop to Los Angeles.
This is weeding on a Herculean scale. But the U.S. Forest Service employee and pioneer in the Angeles National Forest's weed removal program is unstoppable. She leads a team that aims to map and remove entire populations of 48 nonnative plant species crowding out alders, cottonwoods, willows and chaparral.
