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who spent a week this spring training to join the scores of loggers. "We are warriors for the land, and we have a duty and obligation to take the steps to leave something for the next generation."
• To ensure that the fallen trees aren't wasted, the Native Americans are hoping to put the wood to use by building wooden homes on the notoriously run-down and poverty-stricken reservation.
• So far, the Lakota Logging Project has trained about 15 Native Americans, including Shark, with plans to train many more. It marks the largest-scale project to date involving a nonprofit group aiming to help combat the beetle epidemic, said Adam Gahagan, senior forester with Custer State Park.
• "The Black Hills are sacred to our people," said Ramona White Plume, 51, a resident of the reservation. "For generations, people have gone into the Black Hills and

haven't desecrated it. Trees are a living entity. They have families also."
• Angel Munoz, who owns a Rapid City logging company with his wife Barbara, said he isn't surprised that the fight to save the trees is drawing unlikely allies considering that the pine beetle threat is worse than it has ever been.
• "It's getting kind of rough," Munoz said.
• The mountain pine beetles attack in cycles, infecting the wood with a fungus that gives it a blue hue. While the first discovery of this beetle in the area dates

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