In Logan, Utah, the question where is utah state university can sound like simple directions on a map. This week, it also points to two rooms where pressure is being measured differently: a lab table holding tree cross sections, and a softball program navigating a sudden leadership change.
Where Is Utah State University in this story: a lab where drought becomes a record
In the Applied Forest Ecology lab at Utah State University, the evidence of hardship is quiet but unmistakable: variable tree rings that carry the memory of climate trends across centuries. Justin DeRose, a dendrochronologist in the Department of Wildland Resources, studies how trees endure extended droughts, sweltering summers, and subzero winters. Even with that flexibility, he is bracing for what he calls the possibility that this year’s snow drought could become a “tree-ring marker year” in Utah and likely the West.
The mechanics of that marker are simple and stark. Without a winter snowpack to convert into spring runoff, trees shift into very low gear. Growth slows. Rings narrow. In very bad years, DeRose said, there can be no growth and no ring at all—an absence that becomes its own kind of signature.
Alongside DeRose is Ryan Jess, a senior technician in the same lab, working with cross sections of trees to match ring sequences to calendar years. They look for visible markers that show up across many samples in a region: especially narrow rings indicating drought, fire scars, “white rings” tied to defoliation or frost damage, and especially wide rings signaling good growing conditions. These markers help place a particular tree into a longer climate history, turning wood into a timeline.
What does the snow drought mean for Utah forests, and why do scientists call some years “marker years”?
A “marker year” is a year that leaves a clear, widely visible signal in the growth record of many trees. DeRose said this year’s snow total is “spectacularly bad, ” and he expects 2026 to stand out in tree-ring records. He emphasized that he has seen worse in the long record—pointing to 1934 during the Dust Bowl, and around 1580 when tree rings captured a catastrophic drought stretching from Mexico to the Rocky Mountains with civilization-altering consequences for Indigenous populations.
What worries him now is not a single hard year by itself, but the spacing between them. DeRose said drought marker years used to be separated by multiple decades—he cited 1902, 1934, and 1977. More recently, he said, they are happening only years apart: 2002, 2018, 2022, and potentially 2026. Western forests evolved under dramatic wet and dry cycles, he said, but the rhythm of drought is accelerating.
Jess described the compounding effect in human terms. “It’s like a boxing match, ” he said. Trees can take one blow—or several—and keep growing. But when stress stacks again and again over multiple years, it can lead to more widespread mortality. DeRose described how drought years often go hand-in-hand with wildfire, with narrow rings corroborated by fire scars. He also noted that drought-stressed trees struggle to produce resin and chemical defenses that repel bark beetles, creating openings for insects to devastate millions of additional acres. Together, the stacked blows can reshape the ecology of the West, pushing trees past critical thresholds.
What happened in Utah State softball, and how is the program responding?
On Tuesday, March 17 (ET), Utah State head softball coach Todd Judge resigned, effective immediately, Utah State Vice President and Director of Athletics Cameron Walker announced. Assistant coach Shelby Thompson will serve as interim head coach for the remainder of the season.
Walker framed the moment as both gratitude and transition. “I am thankful for the time Todd invested in the softball program, ” he said. “We have confidence in Shelby’s ability to lead the team during this transition. I’m looking forward to the future of the softball program and supporting our student-athletes. ”
The department said a national search for the program’s next head coach will begin immediately. For student-athletes, that announcement lands in the middle of routines built around consistency: practice plans, game preparations, and the day-to-day trust that a season depends on. For the interim coach, it is a new role defined by the calendar—less time to redesign a program than to stabilize it, keep focus, and finish what is already underway.
How do these two stories connect—forest stress and a team’s transition?
One is about forests and the slow mathematics of water and growth; the other is about a team and the suddenness of a resignation. Yet both hinge on resilience under stacking pressures. In DeRose’s work, the problem is not simply one dry year but how repeated droughts compress the recovery time that living systems need. In athletics, transitions can also arrive without warning, leaving the remainder of a season to be carried by people already in motion.
Back in Logan, Utah, where is utah state university becomes less about geography than about proximity to these pressures. It is in the lab where researchers study the marks that climate leaves behind, and it is in the athletic department where leadership decisions shape the present tense of student life. In both places, the response is to keep working: measure what can be measured, name what has changed, and move forward with the people who remain on the field and at the bench.
Image caption (alt text): where is utah state university — tree-ring samples in a Logan lab and a softball field during a leadership transition
