On a sunny Saturday morning, Sara Jo Dickens, her team and a handful of volunteers hiked into the forest next to Park City’s Armstrong Trail. They followed white tape through the trees and bushes, making their way to a spot where the forest floor was blanketed in green vegetation.
To the untrained eye, nothing looks amiss. But the group knows the plants are garlic mustard — noxious weeds that spread so quickly they displace native plants.
“Garlic mustard, in particular, is capable of suppressing other seeds from germinating, so once it's established, you see fewer and fewer natives until you see none,” Dickens said.
Dickens is an ecologist who leads the Summit Cooperative Weed Management Area (CWMA), a nonprofit focused on controlling noxious weeds in Summit County.
She said garlic mustard is an especially dangerous plant as it secretes a chemical that suppresses the microbial nutrients in soil that help prevent diseases in native plants.
Dickens said if the noxious weed takes over, the forest is much more vulnerable — and more dead trees mean increased wildfire risk.
Equipped with blue plastic bags, Dickens and her helpers hand-pulled the weeds near Armstrong Trail to control the spread of garlic mustard.
Dickens said the situation is more pressing this year. The wet October and unseasonably warm winter — which had multiple cycles of snow and melting — have allowed more seeds to germinate.
The warm weather also shifted the pulling season, which usually spans April to August.
“This year it started in May and it will probably be burnt out, so dead, by mid-July,” Dickens said. “So our window to take care of this problem is super short, which makes all work for it incredibly urgent.”
But no matter the year, she says, there is too much garlic mustard to tackle. The cooperative has mapped about 600 acres of the noxious weed in Summit County, but estimates it's growing on around 1,200 acres.
To prevent the weed from spreading, the cooperative first pulls patches on the outskirts of the county, as well as those by trails and streams. That’s where the Garlic Mustard Games come into play.
The annual competition was created to cover more ground and help educate locals on the harms of the plant. Participants earn prizes for pulling the noxious weed.
Volunteer Allison Kierstead joined the Garlic Mustard Games about three years ago. She said she didn’t want to compete at first, just to volunteer. But after being convinced to join in on the fun — and learning that weighing the weeds helps the cooperative get grants — she entered and won the competition two years in a row.
“The funny thing last year was, Sarah Jo found this new patch that hadn't been addressed in a year or two, and the weeds were like literally like four or five feet tall,” Kierstead said. “I just went in there on a couple afternoons, and I could just grab handfuls, and so I think that's what did it.”
Kierstead is one of the most consistent pullers, collecting hundreds of pounds of the noxious weeds and often pulling outside of games events with the company of her dog.
She said the activity checks all the boxes: it’s relaxing, satisfying and provides a sense of community.
Jen Heineman said she’s a self-taught noxious weed hater who’s been pulling all kinds of invasive plants since the 1990s. Her favorite part of the Garlic Mustard Games is the company.
“It's often a lot of girls, and we chat and we laugh while we're pulling, and I just love that. I just love that, the camaraderie of that,” Heineman said.
Dickens said there only a couple of weeks left to pull garlic mustard this season.
Soon, the plants will produce seed pods and start changing color. Once the plants turn tan, they can’t be pulled.
“Those pods are so brittle that if you barely touch them, they can break open and those seeds will get on your clothes or on your equipment, and you accidentally bring them somewhere else,” she said.
During the event Saturday, 10 volunteers pulled over 300 pounds of garlic mustard.
The cooperative’s Nate Butterfield said typically the weeds would have to be hauled out of the forest to prevent reseeding. But this time, the team is testing a new technique: fire crews will add other material to the piles and burn them as part of wildfire prevention work.
Dickens said her team first found the 60-acre patch of garlic mustard near Armstrong Trail in 2016. To some it still looks overgrown, but she said it’s improved immensely.
The sheer volume of the noxious weed in the county can be intimidating, Dickens said, but consistency is key. That’s why her team and volunteers come back year after year to pull.
Dickens said a secret weapon is also coming.
For almost 30 years, scientists have been working on creating a biological control agent that will attack garlic mustard but not native plants. Dickens said a weevil was recently approved for use.
“Not only is it going to help turn the table, but we don't have to use as much herbicide,” she said. “We can release these bugs, and over a four- to six-year period, they may be able to reduce it by like 30 or 40%.”
Dickens said it will take four to five years before Summit County can get the bugs, but the development is encouraging.
In the meantime, Dickens will continue efforts to stop the spread of garlic mustard and save area forests. For the next two weeks or so, locals can help by pulling the weeds on their own property or by adding to trailside pull stations.
