Roy Siefert pilots his Chevrolet Blazer over the snow-caked roads of the Tioga State Forest. It’s midwinter, and a blanket of snow and cold hangs over this wooded tract in northern Pennsylvania. But in the midst of the maples, ash, and pines is a hub of activity.

Siefert, District Forester for the 165,000-acre Tioga Forest, is checking on a network of pipelines, compressor stations, and gas wells that has transformed a portion of the woodlot into an industrial site. “This is just like a little city,” he says.

Exploration of the Marcellus Shale Formation, the nation’s largest reserve of natural gas, is transforming the landscape of Pennsylvania. And the venerable Penn’s Woods are not immune to development.

So far, 700,000 acres of state forest land are under lease to natural gas companies. Estimates suggest that as many as 12,000 wells will be drilled on state forests over the next 20 years.

The Marcellus Shale Formation runs underneath most of the Keystone State, and so far energy companies have concentrated their activities mostly in the state’s northern tier. Industry experts predict that drilling will last for more than 50 years. And along with development on private lands, state-owned property is already seeing its fair share of drilling.

Tioga State Forest has 45,000 acres under lease for gas development, the highest concentration of gas drilling among state forests—so far. For example, in a tract of the Tioga near the college town of Mansfield, the industrial development takes up 185 acres of land. All of this development has brought with it an industrial infrastructure for long-term gas development. There is little question that the state forest system, like much of Pennsylvania, is at a crossroads.

“Some changes will be permanent and some will be negative,” says John Quigley, the former Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR). “How will we strike a balance? Can we preserve the public lands?”

In 2008 Pennsylvania used leases of state forest lands to close a budget gap. Those leases represent the majority of gas exploration currently underway. And it has fundamentally changed how Tioga’s staffers are working, Siefert says. About half of his job duties are now related to Marcellus shale. “It’s really a big juggling job,” he says.

Most of the development in the Tioga woods is occurring on land that was once a strip mine. That factor has allowed the forest agency to minimize the need to take away virgin forest in favor of gas infrastructure. However, there is a decidedly industrial feel to the gas lands. Two drilling rigs tower over the woods, and tanker trucks hauling water to drill sites run at a constant pace over the dirt roads.

Even after the rigs are gone, 10-foot-high well heads will remain, along with looming storage towers. A compressor station, housing eight 4,000-horsepower engines, hums constantly. “This is an industrial facility,” Siefert says.

Over the next year, gas exploration will enter a second phase in another portion of the Tioga Forest. This new exploration will occur south of the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon, an 800-foot-deep canyon cut by glaciers during an ice age. The area, the most heavily used portion of the forest, is rich in recreation opportunities. Roads there are groomed for snowmobiling, and there are endless cross-country ski opportunities. The 62- mile-long Pine Creek Rail Trail, a popular hiking and mountain-bike destination, cuts through some of the most scenic portions of the woods.

“It’s our highest recreation use area and one of our most scenic viewsheds,” Siefert remarks.

In the heart of the woods, gas companies are clearing a roadway to access well sites that will be drilled in coming years. Though not visible from any highways, the drill sites and roads will become part of the scenery that hikers and snowmobilers see while venturing deep into the woods.

“I would not want to see this kind of development spread across our forest system,” Siefert says.

Another view comes from Kerry Gyekis, a forester and member of the county planning commission. “Tioga County has a rich history of forest and timber management,” he says, adding that much of northern Pennsylvania is in transition as gas exploration transforms the region.

Gyekis has worked with forest landowners to try to manage both gas exploration and smart timber usage, but the balance is often difficult. He explains that any time a forest is cut through by development, habitat fragmentation will follow.

“Whenever you bisect a property and build roads through it, you limit what can move through the forest,” he says. “Some companies are doing a good job, but I’ve gone to places where the sites are not well maintained.”

Over time, more than 6,000 wells will be drilled in Tioga County alone. The health of the forest will depend greatly on how the gas companies treat the resource.

“Undoubtedly, some forest will remain, but their consideration is often not about the forests,” says Gyekis. “It is much bigger than anything this area has ever seen.”

Seneca Resources Corp., a subsidiary of National Fuel Gas Co., is one of the companies drilling in state forests. Seneca has worked with state foresters to improve well pad designs to minimize impacts on the environment, says Nancy Taylor, a company spokeswoman. By combining drilling locations and taking advantage of drilling techniques, the company has been able to reduce the number of well pads by one-third.

By using existing road systems and running waterlines instead of trucks, the company says it is reducing wear and tear on the forest. Taylor adds that Seneca tries to locate gas infrastructure out of lines of sight, and takes suggestions from DCNR staff into consideration. “It’s not just hype,” Taylor said. “These are our forests too, and we do everything we can to be good stewards and work with the foresters, regulators, and public to best meet everyone’s needs.”

There is more at stake than just forest stewardship, says Quigley. More leasing of state forests could cause Pennsylvania to lose its accreditation by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, which could deal a significant blow to the state’s forest industry.

“It has obvious benefits from an economic standpoint,” Quigley says. “But it is of critical importance to our environmental legacy.”

Sustainable certification helps move wood products, even when there is a slow timber market. But Pennsylvania also benefits by having the Sustainable Forestry Initiative give its blessing on how the forest is managed.

“I’d hate to see us lose certification,” says Siefert. “Its value overshadows what we might gain from short-term leasing.”

DCNR, which oversees the state’s forests and park system, has instituted a series of monitoring programs to measure impacts on public lands. And in the existing leases, DCNR has oversight on where gas infrastructures are located. The department also added 27 staff members to help monitor gas activity. Still, the department is spending $3 million a month in response to the Marcellus shale drilling.

“Our geologists have long known about the Marcellus Formation,” says Quigley. “What has caught us by surprise is how quickly the industry moved into Pennsylvania. Clearly, it is consuming more and more of the agency.”

During his final days in office last year, former Governor Ed Rendell sided with DCNR staff and enacted a moratorium on future gas leases on state forests.

DCNR scientists recently finished a study that looked at current gas leases, sensitive areas within the forest system, and nearby gas activity. Their conclusion was that any further leasing of state forests would jeopardize the long-term health of the woodlands and cause habitat fragmentation.

“Based on the impacts to the environment and to recreation opportunities, we cannot do anymore wholesale leasing of virgin ground,” Quigley says.

However, Pennsylvania’s new governor, Republican Tom Corbett, has said he wants to overturn the moratorium. According to Jan Jarrett, president of environmental advocacy group PennFuture, a coalition of state environmental and conservation organizations has asked the Corbett administration to keep the moratorium intact. Jarret says that no more state forest land should be leased to help Pennsylvania balance its budget. Instead, the state should enact a tax on gas extraction.

“Unfortunately, the budget pressures are even worse this year. We’d hate to see that one-time spurt of revenue fundamentally compromise the quality of our forest resources.”

Darrin Youker is an environmental reporter who lives in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Slow Progress

The Marcellus Shale formation that has grabbed the attention of both the natural gas industry and concerned environmentalists spans much of the Appalachian Basin, reaching as far north as New York and as far south as Tennessee. Each state containing part of the formation takes a slightly different approach to managing this natural resource and the effects that its extraction can have on the environment and human health.

The most widely used method of natural gas extraction is called hydraulic fracturing, which uses tons of water laced with chemicals to blast through the shale formations and reach the gas inside. The impact of this method can vary according to each location’s unique ecosystem. In late March, the Maryland House of Delegates passed a measure to limit the drilling of natural gas in that state until further studies could be conducted to find exactly how the drilling methods would affect the environment. All drilling in Maryland’s portion of the Marcellus Shale formation will be delayed until August of 2013, when the study should be completed. The bill does allow for drilling permits to be issued before that time, but only if the applicants can prove that the work will be done without harm to the environment or human health.

Opponents of the bill argue that drilling in western Maryland could provide much needed economic stimulus, and help the state recover from the recent recession. That the bill was passed despite the economic potential is proof of how seriously some states are beginning to take the effects of natural gas drilling. Other states and forests with a stake in the Marcellus Shale formation will be paying close attention to the effects of Maryland’s bill, which could soon be one of many across the formation, as well as the progress of their study, which could yield answers to the questions that many have about the true consequences of hydraulic fracturing.

The post Natural Gas vs. Penn Forests appeared first on American Forests.

As the Willamette River winds through downtown Portland, Oregon, it flows past dozens of sewage outfall pipes. On almost any rainy day, you can stand on a riverside walkway and watch as these pipes spew raw sewage into the river.

Over 800 cities across the US, including Portland, have combined sewer systems, which means that they collect and move both sewage and rainwater. During storms, these cities’ treatment plants, and the pipes leading to them, fill up with a combination of sewage and rainwater. That combination often empties into lakes, rivers, and oceans. The idea is that Portland should invest in infrastructure that is literally green (green roofs, trees, and natural areas), along with the grey infrastructure (pipes, roads, and culverts) that cities traditionally build and maintain.

The City As A Funnel

The main part of Portland’s sewer system was built in the early 1900s, when most cities simply dumped raw sewage into rivers, lakes, and oceans. Allowing rainwater to drain into wastewater sewers meant that cities could lay fewer pipes and the rainwater would clean them regularly.

However, Portland’s early planners could not know that future generations would treat sewage. They also could not foresee how many parking lots, roofs, and streets would come to replace the city’s forests and wetlands. Impervious surfaces now funnel in more rainwater than the sewer pipes can hold. Portland’s main sewage treatment plant, built in the 1950s, does not have the capacity to treat the sheer quantity of water that comes with a rainstorm.

In 1991 the Environmental Protection Agency ordered Portland officials to stop raw-sewage overflows. At that time, about six billion gallons of untreated sewage and stormwater flowed into the Willamette and Columbia Rivers each year. The city decided to solve half of its sewage problem with traditional grey infrastructure, including a wastewater storage tunnel, and the other half with projects like downspout disconnection, stream daylighting, and what would become Grey to Green.

83,000 TREES

Theoretically, it’s not all that difficult to plant 83,000 trees in five years. A professional can plant more than a thousand trees in one day. The challenge is to find appropriate places for trees in the complex urban grid. Urban foresters contend with overhead and underground utilities, traffic visibility, growing space, and—perhaps the most complicated part of the equation—property owners. Portland has already planted its tree-worthy public spaces, and has the most to gain from tree planting on private property.

To encourage property owners to plant trees, Grey to Green’s canvassers talk to residents about benefits like air quality and increased home value (up to $7,000 for a big, healthy tree). Canvassers also explain the city’s rewards for tree planting: Property owners can claim a “Treebate” for trees they buy, and receive regular discounts on sewer bills. Property owners can get help at every step of the process from the Portland-area nonprofit Friends of Trees, an organization that helps property owners choose, buy, and plant trees.

If a property owner wants to plant a tree between the street and the sidewalk—an area the city has targeted for planting—an inspector from the city’s Urban Forestry department must assess the site’s intersections, fire hydrants, power lines, stop signs, curbs, property lines, water lines, driveways, and strip width.

“There are a million regulations for planting street trees,” Jennifer Karps says, and it can seem that way. Yet one by one, the trees are planted.

How Much Stormwater Can Trees Manage?

Sometimes it is hard to imagine how this one-by-one approach to tree planting could really make a difference to the city’s overall stormwater problem. How much water can trees really manage? Scientists have studied how trees absorb rainwater, and the relationship between urban trees and stormwater, but the number of studies is still relatively low. Portland’s tree-planting program is well underway, but no one is sure how much stormwater the city’s trees can manage. Geoffrey Donovan, a research ecologist for the US Forest Service in Portland, wants to find out. Donovan has studied how urban trees affect crime rates, birth weights, and home values. Later this year he will turn his attention to the science of trees and stormwater.

“A significant number of trees could reduce the cost of grey infrastructure,” Donovan says. “The question is how many trees constitute a significant number.”

He explains that trees manage stormwater in three basic ways: Roots take up the water and distribute it to the tree; some water lands on leaves and branches and evaporates there; and roots create gaps in the soil that allow water to seep through.

To figure out how much stormwater Portland’s trees manage, Donovan will split the city into about 50 “sewersheds,” noting the amount of canopy cover within each. Working with sewer flow and canopy cover data, he will compare sewersheds to see if trees reduce the amount of stormwater pouring into sewers, or at least reduce sewers’ peak flows.

Peak sewer flow is like peak demand for electricity. Just as electrical utilities design infrastructure to handle the hottest, most air-conditioned day of the summer, sewer utilities design pipes and treatment plants for that maximum-use morning that combines residents’ regular showers, a heavy rainstorm, and a public pool cleaning.

“If you can use trees to flatten out the peak flow,” Donovan says, “you can change the fixed infrastructure.”

Reducing peak flow could save cities a lot of money. With lower flows, they might not have to replace small pipes or expand treatment plants.

Existing treatment plants could also save money on electric bills and basic supplies like chlorine. Fewer raw-sewage overflows would also mean fewer fines paid to the Environmental Protection Agency. And, of course, fewer overflows would lead to cleaner rivers, lakes, and oceans.

Here’s the problem: When sewage flows at its peak, most trees—and the soil around them—have already absorbed as much water as they can. In Portland, where winters are rainy and summers are dry, a tree’s seasonal growth pattern doesn’t line up with the city’s stormwater management goals.

“In a sustained winter storm,” Donovan says, “trees aren’t going to remove a great deal of water from the system.”

Karps acknowledges this challenge. “We don’t know exactly how much stormwater trees can remove from the system,” she says, “but trees also have complementary values: air quality, habitat, food, shelter, sense of place. They’re a more charismatic solution than, say, sumps or pavers.”

The New Sewer Maintenance

Portland does not pay for street-tree maintenance, leaving the cost of pruning, leaf pickup, and sidewalk repair to property owners. When canvassers to talk to people about trees, some residents balk at the expense of maintaining them, and others are startled by the fact that their sewer bills (among the highest in the country) pay for plants.

But Karps insists that trees are infrastructure, and the city should plant and maintain them accordingly. She is not suggesting that the city take over all tree maintenance, but does think that Portlanders should commit to maintaining green infrastructure at the same level they maintain grey infrastructure. If trees are going to remove stormwater from the system, they need to be kept healthy.

Since no one is sure how significantly trees will solve Portland’s stormwater problem, or even if it is possible to plant all 83,000 planned trees, Karps says she has her own measure of the program’s success: “to hit a tree-planting sweet spot—a maximum number of trees along with a maximum number of partners and a maximum number of Portlanders.”

Lisa Ekman writes from Portland, Oregon, and teaches writing at Portland State University.

The post Trees: the New Sewers appeared first on American Forests.

Imagine being Johnny Appleseed in a world where nobody knows what the apple is,” says

Stephen Bost, 53. “That’s what I feel like.” Bost is working to save the Ozark chinquapin (Castanea pumila var. ozarkensis), a close relative of the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) that has unfortunately shared the classic American tree’s devastating fate. Both species have been driven to the brink of extinction by the fungus Cryphonectria parasitica, also known as the chestnut blight. In 2006 Bost founded the Ozark Chinquapin Foundation, now several hundred members strong, to keep this tree from disappearing from the landscape and people’s memories.

The chestnut blight arrived in America from China by way of a Chinese chestnut planted in the Bronx Zoo. First documented in 1904, the fungus spread at a radial rate of 20 miles a year throughout the eastern US, killing an estimated 3 billion American chestnuts, one of the greatest species die-offs in modern history. The iconic American chestnuts were once a major component of eastern forests and a valuable timber tree.

After World War II, the blight jumped the Mississippi River and attacked the Ozark chinquapin. The pre-blight Ozark Chinquapin—isolated first by glaciation and then by the Mississippi River from its American chestnut and Alleghany chinquapin relatives—became an important canopy tree in the ancient mesic forest that makes up today’s Ozarks. Like the American chestnut, the Ozark chinquapin cannot reproduce sexually in any appreciable amount, and survives today in its native range as a blight-stunted, brushy, multi-stemmed shrub.

Researchers can pinpoint when the blight arrived in their neck of the woods. By analyzing data collected from tree-core studies, retired paleoecologist Fred Paillet of the University of Arkansas was able to pinpoint 1957 as the year the blight ravaged a research spot in northwest Arkansas.

In its healthy days, the Ozark chinquapin grew on well-drained upland sites and out-produced most other trees in the forest. A mature Ozark chinquapin produces 6,000 nuts a year, while a mature white oak can produce no more than 2,000 nuts twice a year. The sweet-tasting chinquapin nuts have the highest protein percentage of any tree in the Ozarks.

The blight has been so thorough that most Ozark natives, outside of the older generations, don’t even know the tree. A Missouri native, Bost once spent summers and weekends at his family’s springside cabin in the heart of the Missouri Ozarks, a place he calls the “cool, green, and shady forest that shaped

life.” Now a Missouri State Park naturalist, Bost says that just 10 years ago he didn’t know what an Ozark chinquapin was.

“I’d never even heard of the tree,” says Bost, astounded. It wasn’t until a late-1990s bowhunting trip through the Ozarks that he finally decided to check into a tree that one of his older Ozark-native friends, Hearold Adams, had reminisced about around the campfire. Adams, now 91, talked about the chinquapin trees he loved above all others, the sweet nuts that his family harvested, and the wildlife that called the trees home.

He’s calling it a chinquapin, but it’s an American chestnut, Bost thought to himself. But after checking some maps and seeing that the American chestnut’s range didn’t extend into areas west of the Mississippi, he conducted more research. Visiting libraries and museums throughout Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, and Alabama, he sought more information. Eventually he found a 1907 vegetative map that showed the Ozark chinquapin covering 40 percent of Missouri.

He thought, I’ve fished, canoed, hunted, and set trap lines all over this region—why haven’t I ever seen or even heard of this tree?

Finally convinced of its existence, Bost still had to find a living tree. “It was like hunting a ghost in the forest,” he says. Finally, on a cold, dripping Ozark winter day in January of 2006, after several years of searching, he met his chinquapin ghosts on a cherty, loamy, northwest-facing hillside just outside of Yellville, Arkansas.

Since then he has searched—and inspired others to search—high and low, hill and hollow throughout the Ozarks to find mature Ozark chinquapins and gather their nuts to preserve the tree’s genetic diversity. In the process, he and others note which trees exhibit greater degrees of blight-resistance. Bost says he and his Ozark Chinquapin Foundation colleagues have done a good job with that, and now they are focusing on crossing the more blight-resistant individuals in the hope of creating a resistant lineage. It’s all part of a four-stage action plan to save the tree: Preserve genetic diversity, find blight-resistant trees, cross-pollinate them, and then propagate the seeds.

The work has not been easy; promising trees have died, planted seeds have been eaten by wildlife, and healthy trees—already few and far between—seem to be dwindling.

Bost acknowledges he is only the latest face in the unselfish effort by many to save the Ozark chinquapin. The annual Ozark Chinquapin Foundation meeting in March indicated the tree’s broad support, with citizens and representatives from federal, state, and private agencies attending. Bost compares the years of work to save the Ozark chinquapin to slowly honing in on a radio-station signal. Sometimes it’s strong, sometimes it’s weak, but the signal is slowly coming in louder and clearer as the goal gets closer.

Bost’s passion is both clear and contagious. He describes his life in thankful terms–being outside, raising honeybees, wearing blue jeans, being with trees–and in the process shares the sense of fulfillment he gets from his work. The effect one person can have on a land and a community is a point of inspiration that helps him continue. “One person can make a huge difference,” he says, “and I have come to realize that we never fully understand the impact we have on other people or the world around us.”

Visit www.ozarkchinquapin.com to learn more.

Paul Hagey is a freelance writer living in Oakland, California. See his work at www.paulhagey.com.

The post Tree Saver appeared first on American Forests.

Frustration and outrage were the core emotions that led to two men’s decisions to take on abandoned trail-building projects in the wildest parts of the Arkansas and Missouri Ozarks. Frustrated with the half-hearted approach to local trail construction and maintenance, Tim Ernst formed the Ozark Highlands Trail Association (OHTA) to create and maintain the Ozark Highlands Trail in Arkansas. Similar outrage led his Missouri counterpart, John Roth, to found his own state’s Ozark Trail Association (OTA). Today, Ernst and Roth’s all-volunteer associations care for and expand these trails. The ultimate goal is to merge their trails at the Arkansas-Missouri border to create a 700-mile-long through trail from Fort Smith, Arkansas to St. Louis, Missouri. That Trans-Ozark Trail won’t become reality anytime soon, but it remains the goal as the two separate trails continue to grow toward one another.

These two trails are well known among avid cross-country hikers, simply because they offer treks in some of the most scenic country found between the Appalachians and the Rockies. They traverse sections of two National Forests and the country’s first National River, and snake their way up and down rugged hills and “hollers” to scenic points that take one’s breath away.

Arkansas’ Ozark Highland Trail

Ernst explains how his frustration began to grow back in 1979, when he was working for the US Forest Service helping coordinate youth groups building short lengths of trail that essentially led to nowhere.

“I hiked each new short section as they were completed,” Ernst recalls. “One thing that was really odd—they did not build the trail up to a road. They would quit the construction 100 yards back in the woods so that the trail could not be seen from the road. They were actually hiding the trail, and didn’t want anyone to use it until the entire thing was complete—a really dumb idea!” Why would anyone go to the effort of building short, disconnected lengths of trails and make no effort to create trailheads?

“The result was that no one ever knew about the trail outside of the Forest Service and myself. I was the only hiker who knew about or used those first few trail sections,” he recalled.

Ernst said that it quickly became obvious to him that the Forest Service was not in the hiking-trail business. Trails Act funds, which had gone into the sputtering trail-building efforts in both Arkansas and Missouri, dried up and all new construction was halted by 1980.

“It became clear,” he said, “that the only way the Ozark Highlands Trail (OHT) would ever become a reality was if a group of volunteers was formed to do the work. The government wasn’t going to have anything more to do with it, so I got the group going, and the rest is history.”

“The rest” involved calling together likeminded folks for a meeting in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in the fall of 1981. He expected a few avid hikers to attend, but was shocked when more than 50 came, and they soon formed the core of the OHTA. Since that first organizational meeting 30 years ago, more than 3,000 OHTA volunteers from 22 states have given over 300,000 hours of their time to create and maintain a trail that runs unbroken from Lake Fort Smith to Woolum on the Buffalo National River, a total of 165 miles, all of it within the Ozark National Forest.

At Woolum, the OHT connects to the Buffalo River Trail, running alongside the Buffalo National River, a gem of a national treasure. Twenty-six miles of the Buffalo River Trail are complete, and OHTA and other volunteers are currently working with the Park Service on an additional 15-mile section along the river to help speed that project along. An “orphan” portion of the Ozark Highlands Trail runs through 31 miles of the Leatherwood Wilderness Area of the Ozark National Forest, and can currently be reached only by “bushwhacking” through a 15-mile section of another wilderness area.

Ernst oversaw most of the OHTA’s efforts as its first and only president, contributing more than 18,000 hours of his own time until he gave up the reins in 2009.

Missouri’s Ozark Trail

In 1997, St. Louis businessman John Roth was dismayed by the deplorable conditions he found hiking along the Trace Creek trail in the northeastern portion of the Mark Twain National Forest. He called the Forest Service to complain. The agency’s Paul Nazarenko was on the receiving end of that call, and told Roth that if he wanted to see a better trail, he could just come out and help fix it. Nazarenko recalls Roth showing up a day later, wearing loafers, looking like a “computer geek,” but ready to work.

Roth and a fellow outdoorsman, John Donjoian, figured out early on that the meager efforts of a ragtag band of trail workers weren’t going to get the job done. Not only did the many lengths of disconnected trails in southeast Missouri need to be maintained, but they would also need to be connected in order to create the Ozark Trail. Roth and Donjoian saw that it would take an organization of enthusiastic volunteers to create a lasting trail, and in 2002 Roth founded the Ozark Trail Association (OTA) with the mission to develop, maintain, preserve, promote, and protect the rugged natural beauty of the Ozark Trail.

Roth served as the organization’s first president, and began to craft a dream that the Ozark Trail would one day extend from St. Louis to Arkansas and rival the Appalachian Trail in popularity. Under his leadership, the OTA grew to more than 2,000 volunteers, fixing existing trails and building new ones to tie them all together. In 2008 alone, 500 OTA volunteers donated 13,300 hours of service, and were recognized by the Forest Service with a Volunteer Program Award. Roth was not to see his association’s work move forward. In 2008, he died in an accident on his farm in Steelville, Missouri.

The Ozark Trail now stretches from Onondaga Cave State Park in Crawford County, southwest of St. Louis, to the Eleven Point River in Howell County, just 30 miles from the Arkansas border. The continuous trail is now 230 miles long, and, in adding an important loop trail to the east and other spurs, the OTA oversees more than 360 miles of well-maintained pathway through these rugged Missouri Ozarks. The trail system is gaining popularity among a diverse group of folks: serious long-distance backpackers, families seeking daylong outdoor adventures, backcountry bicyclists, and horseback trail riders.

Working the Trails

Nature has a way of inexorably reclaiming its own. Foot trails, once established within the confines of a wilderness, are there only as long as humans continue to intervene. Without constant maintenance, a trail quickly fades into its surroundings, becoming littered by deadfall, choked by brambles and sprouts, and eroded by rain.

Both trail associations address this reality with their “Adopt-A-Trail” programs. By agreement, adopters promise to maintain a specific section of trail two or three times a year. During these daylong or overnight outings, groups of individuals, a variety of organizations, and sometimes whole families descend upon their sections with lopping shears, shovels, mattocks, weedeaters, and (for those certified by the Forest Service) chainsaws.

Roy Senyard, an OHTA board member who coordinates maintenance, works to keep the 81 sections of trail adopted at all times, and joins in to handle the big jobs when large trees fall across the trail. As hard as the work can be, it remains a true labor of love for Senyard, who retired to the Ozarks and just happened to discover a trail sign while on a drive through the country. He began hiking regularly and joined OHTA “just to give back for all it gives to me. It’s a never-ending job, but when a hiker passes you while you’re working and just says ‘Thanks for what you do,’ it makes it all worthwhile.”

In Missouri there are 94 trail segments caringly maintained by those who have adopted them. Ozark Trail president Steve Coates says of the labor-intensive efforts involved in building and maintaining trails, “The OTA provides an opportunity to give something back. Plus, it lets me express my love for the outdoors and for hiking. It is very satisfying to work side-by-side with a wonderful group of volunteers during a day of trail building, and then to enjoy walking out over the trail that we just built. It is rewarding to know that newly constructed trail will be something future generations can enjoy.”

OHTA PresidentWade Colwell echoes that sentiment: “There’s nothing more rewarding or satisfying than when you turn around at the end of the day and walk back down the soft path your efforts have created. You feel a definite afterglow.”

“I used to hike the OHT without any thought about maintenance,” says OHTA board member Jim Warnock. “I thought people were paid to do what little maintenance was needed. Boy, was I mistaken! When the section from Dockery Gap back to Lake Fort Smith was abandoned for several years while the new park was being built, I got to see just how quickly a trail could disappear. I continued to hike that section, did some marking and light lopping, and over time developed a sense of ownership. I came to love hiking that 4.5-mile section in all seasons, so when it once again became an official part of the OHT, I was able to adopt it.” Back in Missouri, OTA board member and “Mega Events” coordinator Greg Echele speaks of the bonds that working on the trail forms. “For some of us the Ozark Trail Association is like a big, productive family. Working and playing together, we have produced a remarkable outcome. We have constructed 43 miles of fresh trail, and we maintain 250 miles of existing trail with 700 paid members and 6,000 volunteers. This labor of love provides recreational opportunities for everyone who wants to enjoy the beautiful Ozark forest.”

Overcoming Challenges

In the past few years, the work of the volunteers in both states has been set back dramatically by natural disasters. A plague of red oak borers has taken a great toll on the Ozarks, although most knowledgeable observers now believe that the infestation is finally playing out. In the winter of 2009, a devastating ice storm felled or severely damaged Ozark hardwoods and pines by the thousands. Evidence of that damage is still visible, but the work to keep the trails clear goes on. If those disasters weren’t enough, a series of storms in the spring of 2009 caused some massive mudslides along the OHT that are still being dealt with.

Possibly the most amazing thing about these tireless volunteers is that most of them have day jobs. Ernst is a noted nature photographer and author. Colwell is an investment consultant. Coates is a highway planner and consultant to the Missouri Highway Department. The one constant among them is their glee when they leave their respective cities behind and head into the Ozarks’ most remote areas via the trails they have helped build.

As for the dream of one day connecting the Ozarks Highland Trail and the Ozark Trail to complete the Trans-Ozarks Trail, there is optimism it will one day happen, but major obstacles must be overcome.

In Missouri, at least 70 miles of the 100-mile corridor along the Meramec River from McDonald County to St. Louis are privately owned. On the south end of the Missouri trail, private land ownership stands in the way ofcrossing that final stretch to Norfork Lake on the Arkansas-Missouri border, and much of that property has been turned into pasture, making for a less natural landscape for hikers to enjoy.

In Arkansas, one of the OHTA’s challenges is a stretch through the Lower Buffalo Wilderness Area that would connect the main trail to the Leatherwood section. The Buffalo National River superintendent has nixed plans for an 18-inchwide trail through that area. Members say they are hoping, with a recent change of superintendents, this decision will be overturned. Finally, the OHTA hopes to connect with a series of trails around Norfork Lake that are being built by a different group of volunteers in the Mountain Home, Arkansas area with the assistance of the US Army Corps of Engineers. From there, the bridge that already spans the lake would be the final link.

Connected or not, these two trails offer some of the greatest opportunities in the Midwest to explore the natural landscape of an ancient plateau. For both the seasoned cross-country hiker and families just looking for a few hours in the mountains, they provide a unique chance to drink of what Henry David Thoreau called “the tonic of wilderness.”

Jerry Dupy writes from the heart of the Ozarks near the Arkansas-Missouri border.

The OTA and the OHTA

The Ozark Trail Association is based in Potosi, Missouri. Its website, www.ozarktrail.com, offers an extensive array of photos, maps, member comments, and a very good hike planner. Membership in the association is $20 a year for individuals. The group meets monthly, and sponsors several special events throughout the year. For a published overview of the trail, with detailed descriptions and photos of each section of the Ozark Trail, “The Ozark Trail Guide,” written by Peggy Welch and Margo Carroll, is available online at www.ozarktrailguide.com.

The Ozark Highland Trail Association’s website, online at www.ozarkshighlandtrail.com, gives details on upcoming events, current information on trail conditions, and lets you download a membership form. Dues are $20 a year, and the group meets monthly in Fayetteville. A comprehensive guidebook, “Ozark Highlands Trail Guide,” written by OHTA founder and longtime president Tim Ernst, is available at www.timernst.com.

The post A Tale of Two Trails appeared first on American Forests.

At first it was little more than a vision—a belief that rural people could nurture their communities by caring for the forests in their own backyards. The believers were a rag-tag group of housewives, local officials, loggers, and landowners. They had little power beyond their certainty that together they could form partnerships to repair the broken-down systems that were degrading their public lands and devastating their small towns.

Today that vision has burgeoned into a national movement known as community-based conservation. Born out of frustration with federal land-management programs and their failure to benefit rural communities, it is recognized from the halls of the US Congress to the backwoods of Idaho. At a time when one in three rural kids lives in poverty, this grassroots movement remains far short of eliminating the cycles of boom and bust that plague resource-dependent economies. But it has nudged new policies out of federal bureaucracies and created jobs for thousands of people.

“I’ve never been more optimistic,” says Jack Shipley, co-founder of the Applegate Partnership, and an early rural coalition organizer.

What began with a handful of tentative arrangements—thinning 10 acres of national forest here, 12 there—has grown to multi-year contracts to restore tens of thousands of acres of public land. Last year the Forest Service entered into 8,931 grants and agreements with hundreds of partners on projects valued at over $1.48 billion. Community-based conservation has altered the process of managing federal lands, says Joe L. Meade, acting Associate Deputy Chief of the US Forest Service.

It has done this on the   strength of four key concepts:   collaboration, stewardship, reinvestment, and monitoring. Instead of duke-it-out disputes to determine who does what on the land, partnerships of environmentalists, woods workers, and agency officials are sharing the responsibility. Instead of tree-by-tree projects that look no farther than the next hillside and year, national forests are planning decade-long work that restores ecosystems across entire landscapes. Instead of dumping restoration revenue into the national treasury, it is being returned to the local area to fund additional stewardship projects. And instead of completing a project and hoping for the best, anyone with an interest is encouraged to scientifically scrutinize the results to improve the next project.

“We’ve changed the conversation at the national policy level,” says Maia Enzer, policy program director at Sustainable Northwest in Portland, Oregon.

Stalemate to Stewardship

When Enzer and a committee of community representatives first organized, the discourse was less conversational than confrontational. After decades of domination by a get-out-the-cut mentality to maximize timber harvests, Forest Service managers were trapped between industrial timber companies, which wanted to continue aggressively harvesting big trees, and environmentalists bent on halting all logging on national forests. These old enemies gathered in 1996 at the Seventh American Forest Congress in the glitz of Washington’s Sheraton ballroom alongside academics, agency officials, and small-town activists—all elbow-to-elbow under the crystal chandeliers.

For Shipley, it was the first time he had a place at the table. A lean landowner with a thinning ponytail, Shipley spent a decade battling local loggers and fighting timber sales in rural southern Oregon. When his longtime logger foe reached out to him, Shipley reached back. They formed the Applegate Partnership, and began planning federal timber sales that would protect local creeks and meadows.

Very little happened: “We were totally naïve. We weren’t even a part of the ballgame,” he says.

But like other rural residents, Shipley was dedicated to healing the land that surrounded his home. He realized that grassroots activists’ only power was to commit to working with anyone who could be part of the solution. By refusing to participate in traditional divide-and-conquer tactics, Shipley and other community representatives used their outsider status to create a third way: collaboration.

Through the Forest Congress, and with the support of Fran Korten of the Ford Foundation, they formed a group known as the Communities Committee under the initial leadership of Lynn Jungwirth from Hayfork, California, then Carol Daly of Columbia Falls, Montana. They went home to launch small projects on federal land that restored eroded streams and removed the small trees that were increasing the risk of wildfire and disease. The work was designed to improve the health of the land and provide local jobs.

Over the next few years, the Communities Committee members worked with the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management officials, often raising their own money to fund projects demonstrating that local workers had the equipment and the skills to restore damaged land. They also encouraged new approaches for the federal agencies to develop and fund these projects, including stewardship contracting. Local agency officials were generally enthusiastic, and joined the community activists in calling for further exploration of stewardship contracting. In 1999, Congress authorized 28 pilot projects that included provisions for multiple stakeholders to assess the long-term potential of this tool.

Today stewardship contracting has strong support from Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell, and is an active part of forest management programs throughout the West. In Oregon and Washington, one of the more aggressive regional programs treated nearly

28,000 acres last year, doubling the previous annual acreage. In addition to promoting local collaboration and healthier forests, these 10-year contracts yielded 160 million board-feet of lumber, nearly one-third of the region’s total board-footage for sawlogs, chips, and biomass.

The stewardship program is also a moneymaker. In 2010, the revenue from sawlogs, biomass, and wood chips harvested on stewardship projects in Region Six yielded $11.1 million. Around $6 million was paid to contractors for the work they performed. The remaining $5.1 million will be reinvested in future stewardship contracts, says Tracy Beck, acting Region 6 director of natural resources.

Boots-on-the-Ground Coalitions

Stewardship contracting did not become an accepted practice on federal lands simply on the merits of benefitting the land and local economies alone. The Communities Committee quickly realized the need for new federal policies that would direct agency officials to design and fund these projects, and offer incentives for innovations. Enzer had been a policy director with American Forests based in Washington, DC, but in 2000 she moved west to focus on the collaborative initiatives underway at Sustainable Northwest.

A vivacious woman with a mop of curly brown hair, Enzer understood the role western communities could play in shaping land management policies. She continued “Week in Washington,” a program that brings leaders of small-town coalitions to DC to meet with their elected representatives. Idaho loggers, New Mexico ranchers, and California mushroom pickers have all trekked to the nation’s capital to pitch their solutions for the on-the-ground dilemmas they face. Calling themselves the Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition (RVCC), they have formed a cadre of citizen lobbyists in Carhartts and Bean boots.

The RVCC offers support to leaders developing projects in isolated communities, and provides elected officials with a community perspective on conservation, something that had not been done before. “People feel empowered by being part of a coalition,” says Enzer, who coordinates the group. “This is their agenda. They are participating in their own democracy—what America is all about.”

Their close ties to the land and consistent call for collaboration give these grassroots leaders an authenticity that has earned respect among policymakers. Their commitment to restoring natural resources has also attracted environmentalists. Todd Schulke, a founding member and forest-policy analyst with the Center for Biological Diversity, began watching from afar as Enzer mobilized rural communities to drum up support for policy changes. Although Schulke and his environmental organization emerged from the timber wars as victors, he realized the work of restoring forest landscapes was just beginning: “We won the war, and the wounded were out in the woods. These people knew things I don’t know—things I need to know.”

Once he was convinced it didn’t represent the timber industry, Schulke began working with the RVCC. Today he calls it “the most organized savvy policy group in the country.”

Several national environmental organizations have made significant changes in their approach to restoration that reflect the influence of communities. The Wilderness Society has added a green-jobs program to its national agency, and works closely with local groups to make their forests more resilient to wildfire. The Nature Conservancy has become a leading advocate for collaboration in resolving land-use dilemmas. Enzer says the participation of national environmentalists has helped community groups understand traditional policy-making, an important step to changing it.

One of collaboration’s most significant achievements is the preservation of 320,000 acres of Montana’s working landscape through a 2009 act of Congress. Northwest Connections, a tiny nonprofit organization in Swan Valley and an RVCC member, worked with Trust for Public Lands, The Nature Conservancy, and Plum Creek Timber Company to protect these industrial timberlands from conversion to housing and commercial development (see “Ensuring a Timberland Legacy,” American Forests, Winter 2009). Along with protecting the land, the agreement includes a commitment to deliver 92 million board-feet of logs to local sawmills.

Enzer credits Northwest Connections for reaching out to environmental and timber groups to achieve this landmark legislation: “We are the grassroots of the conservation movement,” she says. “We are the people making it happen, and we are doing it by working together.”

Community coalitions are active throughout the country. The issues east of the Mississippi are somewhat different, but the commitment to collaboration is identical, says Gerry Gray, senior vice president of programs at American Forests. The Central Appalachian Network has brought together seven nonprofit groups in five states to coordinate a forest-products network that supplies certified wood and wood products to schools, hospitals, and other civic centers. It is part of a larger effort to create economic, environmentally sustainable opportunities using local workers and natural resources.

In the Southeast, the National Wildlife Federation is working with the Forest Service and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives to develop programs that ensure the future of minority-owned forests. Among them are longleaf pine restoration, and a plan to link individual owners for group certification through the Forest Stewardship Council.

In New Hampshire, representatives of 40 different communities, organizations, and public agencies have assembled a roadmap to guide them through the issues of using wood biomass for heating and power generation. It came as a response to construction of several biomass facilities around the state, and interest in using local resources to plan for the energy future of communities throughout New Hampshire.

American Forests recently brought together around 30 local groups to form the Coalition for Eastern Forests and Communities. Oriented more toward private forests than its western counterpart, the coalition is working with RVCC to build a national movement for community-based conservation, says Gray.

Policy and Partnerships

The Eastern Coalition is forming at a time when the grassroots movement boasts an impressive legacy of policy accomplishments. Since the 1999 stewardship legislation, it has helped pass New Mexico’s Community Forest Restoration Act of 2000; the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000, designed to compensate counties with federal land for lost property taxes, reauthorized through 2011; portions of the 2003 Healthy Forests Restoration Act; and parts of the 2008 Farm Bill that provide incentives for collaboration and habitat restoration. The most recent policy achievement is the 2009 Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Act, which encourages large-scale, long-term, and collaborative forest restoration projects on federal lands.

The Forest Service relies on community collaboration to accomplish its mission, says Meade, the deputy assistant chief. The groups have helped reduce the incidence of land-management disputes and the costs of resolving them. Shifting problem solving toward a more open and democratic process has also brought “new excitement, creativity, and hope into the realm of natural resource management,” Meade says.

The movement has had its share of disappointments. Jefferson State Forest Products was a forest community icon—a bootstrap business hailed for manufacturing wooden fixtures in rural Hayfork, California, a town of 2,600 residents. Launched by Jim Jungwirth and Greg Wilson, it was a step toward restoring jobs to the community after Sierra Pacific Industries closed its sawmill in 1997. In December, Upstream 21, the owner since 2007, announced it would move the operation to Grants Pass, Oregon, despite a gentlemen’s agreement to stay in Hayfork.

Combined with its early successes, the setback in Hayfork offers lessons that are helping communities around the West, says Enzer. Among those benefitting is the timber town of Lakeview, Oregon. In 1990 Lakeview had four operating sawmills. By 1998 the only one left was Fremont, owned by Collins Pine Co. Concerned that their community would lose that one, too, county commissioners began looking for help. They found Martin Goebel, founder and president of Sustainable Northwest. Goebel began working with county and Collins Pine officials on a plan to harvest trees from 500,000 acres of the Fremont Winema National Forest. His primary tool was collaboration.

To make a partnership work, everyone has to give something up, says Wade Mosby, Collins’ senior vice president. Collins gave up logging old-growth trees. “A lot of timber companies would fight over that. We said we’ve got to be realistic,” Mosby says. So Collins retooled its Fremont Sawmill for small-diameter logs, hoping that environmentalists would recognize the benefits of removing the small trees choking the national forest.

Mosby says the turning point came when Andy Kerr, “dean of everything environmental in all of Oregon,” wrote an opinion piece for the local newspaper giving the project his approval. In November, Lakeview officials announced authorization of a biomass plant to be built next to the Collins Pine sawmill and fueled by logging and mill residues. Incoming up with a combination of projects that create local jobs and improve forest health, the Lakeview leaders have taken a traditional forest economy and used it to initiate renewable energy.

The Changing Challenges

Energy will continue to be a focus as rural areas work to achieve greater self-sufficiency. In addition to biomass and wood-pellet plants, many communities are in the process of exploring or installing solar, geothermal, and wind-energy facilities. Moving from ecosystem restoration to energy independence shows how community-based conservation is expanding its scope from small and relatively simple forest-restoration projects to those that encompass the larger landscape. Defining natural resource work in this broader context is convincing youth to return to or stay in their rural hometowns. They are drawn by fisheries and watershed restoration, as well as the opportunity to revive family ranches and farms.

For these programs to succeed, the future must also include changes in the way federal agencies fund the work. Instead of separate accounts restricted to hazardous fuels or flood control, land managers need a budgeting process that allows them to reinvest in restoration across entire landscapes. Enzer is encouraged that President Obama included integrated resource restoration as a line item in his current budget.

Liberating resource-dependent economies from boom-bust cycles remains mostly elusive, but Enzer is unequivocal about the goal: “The pendulum stops here.” She points to the number of people engaged in the movement—thousands beyond the handful of pioneers who launched the community-based conservation movement 15 years ago. She ticks off a long list of landscapes across the country where the benefits of their hard-fought efforts are obvious.

Community-based conservation has affected participants from grassroots organizers in their tiny isolated towns to federal bureaucrats in downtown DC cubicles. They have emerged with a new ethic that demands working as partners and adapting to change together.

“The world has changed, but the ecological need for work has not,” Enzer says. “If we continue to work together, there’s nothing we can’t take on.”

Jane Braxton Little writes from Plumas County, CA.

The post Conservation by Coalition appeared first on American Forests.

The Beginning

While attending Warren Wilson College in western North Carolina, I would regularly stop by the campus library to see if the latest issue of American Forests magazine had arrived. At that time, a National Champion tree was featured in each issue. As an arborist and environmental studies major, I was tremendously interested in how big eastern trees could get. Stories of huge tuliptrees, oaks, and willows, and the breadth of the National Register of Big Trees, led me to think that all the champs had been found. Still, I tried my hand at breaking a record by climbing a huge shingle oak and dropping a tape to determine the height. It was 18 big tree points shy of the record, but the fever had struck. I was obsessed with big trees!

In 1993 I began working for the National Park Service in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina and Tennessee, affectionately known as the Smokies. I was assigned to the Old-Growth Project, mapping unlogged forests of oak and hemlock. Our task was to delineate these forests and prepare for future management. Work with the hemlocks involved preparing for the arrival of the dreaded hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA). In the early 1950s HWA was accidentally introduced from Japan on nursery stock sent to Richmond, Virginia. By the 1990s it had already destroyed hemlocks up north and was expected to arrive in the Smokies in the early 2000s.

The Passion

The Old-Growth Project exposed me to numerous big, ancient specimens of many species. I took measurements, consulted the National Register, and discovered that I had found some champions! My first champ was a red maple that measured a whopping seven feet in diameter. I quickly discovered 21 more champs, including a huge eastern hemlock in one of the mapped groves. After completing the Old-Growth Project, I cofounded the Eastern Native Tree Society (ENTS), an internet-based group dedicated to the appreciation and measurement of eastern trees. Since 1996 we have developed highly accurate measuring techniques and built a database of over 10,000 accurately measured trees, many of them described on the extensive website (www.nativetreesociety.org). Knowing that the arrival of HWA was imminent, we started applying these techniques to the great hemlocks of the Smokies.

The Nightmare

In the back of my mind lurked the inevitable day when I would hear that HWA had arrived in “my” woods. In a wilderness area in South Carolina on December 3, 2001, I was climbing a tree that I hoped would break the world height record for eastern hemlock. While descending the 167.7-foot East Fork Spire (which turned out to be eight inches shy of a new record), I brushed up against a branch and noticed a woolly fluff on my jacket. The hemlock woolly adelgid had arrived in my woods. I received word a few months later that HWA had been officially discovered in the Smokies. By 2004 the East Fork Spire was dead. By 2005 virtually all of the groves I had mapped in the Old-Growth Project were infested. By 2007 they were essentially dead. Those lush, deep green cathedrals of ancient hemlocks—some with trees over 500 years old—were now sun-baked stands of gray skeletons. The results of centuries of undisturbed growth were erased in a mere four years, and my own forest legacy was disappearing.

Despite their numbers, the hemlocks had no dying voice. I felt compelled to tell their story, and became an attendee or guest lecturer at every event possible to spread the word. My work was featured in numerous articles and even on television, but I still wanted more for the hemlocks.

The Project

The ENTS takes great pride in finding and documenting the maximum height of eastern trees. For the hemlocks, it would be only a few years until all in my area were dead. It became my mission to prevent the eastern hemlock from dying without proper acknowledgment and accurate documentation.

Thus was born the Tsuga Search Project, sponsored by Appalachian Arborists, the National Park Service, and ENTS. “Tsuga” (soo-gah) is the Latin genus of hemlock. This project had several lofty goals. We wanted to know how tall hemlocks could grow, how much wood they could amass, and where they achieved their maxima. We also wanted a clear picture of what the forest was like around the superlative trees—in other words, to take an “ecological snapshot” of the species and its habitat before it disappeared. We wanted to leave a legacy for the future, but were running out of time.

Finding (and Losing) the Giants

What is a superlative hemlock? We knew from past ENTS surveys that hemlocks were rarely found over 160 feet tall. By taking diameters aloft, we could calculate the wood volume in the tree. This had been done for several hemlocks, and we knew 1,200 cubic feet was a really big hemlock. These trees represented many years of searching by ENTS; thus we selected 160 feet tall and 1,200 cubic feet of wood as “superlative.”

Along with Jess Riddle, an accomplished ENTS tree hunter, we began the project with 22 known hemlocks over 160 feet tall. As field surveys progressed, we began to home in on the particular habitat needed for a superlative hemlock. We found that the ideal habitat not only required old trees but also fell into a discreet elevation range and slope aspect. Although we climbed and measured hemlocks in seven states, the tallest and largest were consistently found in old-growth forests in the near “temperate rainforests” of the southern Appalachians. In fact, all the superlative trees found in the project are within 65 miles of each other in North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina.

The lion’s share were found within the Smokies. The park contains nearly 200,000 acres of old-growth forest, 35,000 of which have a significant hemlock component. To date, not a single hemlock located by ENTS outside of the southern Appalachians exceeds 1,000 cubic feet of wood volume or 160 feet tall. In fact, some of the Tsuga Search trees had co-dominant forks that are larger and taller than some state champion hemlocks!

As the project progressed, we sensed there was a “holy grail” to be found in the forests. The number of 160-foot hemlocks soared to near 70 specimens, but none had yet been found to reach 170 feet. Then, one winter day in 2007, Jess discovered it: A slender tree among larger ones managed to hold its head high, and was measured at 171.6 feet from the ground. A climb was immediately arranged to get a more accurate measurement, and the tape confirmed it: 171.7 feet! On this same ridge, two more hemlocks were located and measured at over 170 feet. The second tree climbed reached 172.1 feet. The third, a huge tree we named the Usis Hemlock, soared to 173.1 feet tall, a new world height record!

Usis was later the subject of a documentary film, The Vanishing Hemlock: A Race Against Time, to be released later this year. The extraordinary tree was also featured in a three-dimensional crown-mapping project. Though now dead, Usis has been preserved via a complex 3-D mapping system.

Even at 1,533 cubic feet of wood, Usis was not the largest hemlock discovered. Only four hemlocks have been documented over 1,500 cubic feet. The Caldwell Giant, one of the last discovered, was a six-foot-diameter beast that racked up 1,601 cubic feet of wood. At 393 points, it would have been an unbeatable National Champion had HWA not claimed it first.

These giants were breaking records while on their deathbeds. As the Tsuga Search wound down, we focused our remaining time and resources on detailed study of the 15 tallest and 15 largest trees documented. We took “ecological snapshots” of the forest, compiled a huge database, and submitted the final report to the National Park Service. By 2008, every one of the 75 hemlocks discovered over 160 feet tall was confirmed dead. As for the largest trees, all were dead . . . except one.

The Story of the Cheoah Hemlock

Today, a single superlative tree survives from the project. It exists only because its owners provided the extensive resources necessary to save it. It stands as a peerless representative of a vanished race of giants.

In 2004 my company was hired by the US Forest Service to release an HWA predator beetle, Sasajiscymnus tsugae, as a biological control agent into an old-growth hemlock forest. We climbed the ancient trees and released thousands of little beetles into the canopy to combat the growing HWA infestation. During this climb, one of the USFS employees introduced me to a huge tree downstream that he had named Cheoah. I was floored! I had never seen such a huge hemlock—and I had seen many huge hemlocks.

The tree, on adjacent Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust property, was not on the climb list for the beetle release. I returned a few weeks later and measured the tree at roughly 158 feet tall and over five feet in diameter. These attributes alone do not make a really big hemlock. What made this tree stand out were the depth of crown and the massive, slow-tapered trunk. The trunk forked multiple times into an ascending forest of smaller stems. The foliage nearly reached the ground, with cascading branches cloaking the tree in a green coat nearly 150 feet deep. It was literally a tower of green.

This tree became a priority for Tsuga Search documentation. We returned in March 2006 to climb the tree, measure it, and complete vegetation plots. The Cheoah stood at 158.7 feet tall and held 1,564 cubic feet of wood—a new record!

Record-breaker or not, we were saddened to see the tree’s decline in health. Over the two previous years, all the branch tips had died, and the foliage was now gray and sparse. Some of the nearby trees were stone-dead; HWA had a firm grip on the forest, and the trees were losing.

It soon became evident that the beetle release was failing. Like its companions, the great Cheoah was dying. Later in 2006, Cheoah and 12 companions were treated with a systemic insecticide. Alarmingly, the Cheoah showed no new growth in 2007. A highly soluble and quick-acting product, trade-named Safari, was released in 2007 and held great promise in the preservation of hemlocks. The Cheoah was chosen as a deserving candidate in a trial application in October 2007, but hopes were not high. Even with insecticides, no tree this large had ever survived an HWA attack.

We revisited Cheoah in the spring of 2008, just after bud-break, fully expecting a dead tree. Instead, we gazed upon a tower of lime-green new growth. The tree was responding, but had not completely recovered. Portions of the top were still declining, and if large sections died, catastrophic structural failures could occur in the crown. We supposed that the insecticide couldn’t make it to the top in lethal concentrations through areas of “vascular confusion,” including forks, reiterations, and fused structures. These features are all part of the very complex architecture of the tree, but they may have been thwarting modern efforts of preservation.

Undaunted, in the fall of 2010 the Valent Corporation (which distributes Safari), the Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust, and Appalachian Arborists attempted the first aerial application of Safari.We were to climb above the vascular confusions and apply the bark-penetrating Safari where it was needed: 120 feet up in the top.

The tree was rigged, and three climbers went aloft. Swinging above the tree’s forked twists and turns, we applied the insecticide to the trunk with a paintbrush. The application went smoothly, and we now anxiously await the new growth in spring 2011 with hope that the top will once again burst forth in lime-green glory.

A Solo Legacy

The preservation and continued survival of this giant tree illustrates the importance of caring for our national legacy of trees. In the presence of HWA, giants like this will not be seen for centuries, if ever again.

The ecological collapse of the hemlock forests in the southern Appalachians does not have to be mirrored elsewhere. Timely and appropriate management, coupled with dedicated resources, can save vestiges of our hemlock legacy. In the short term, hemlocks can be saved via systemic insecticides, which will buy the trees some time until a large-scale control can be found.

The Cheoah now represents the grandest eastern hemlock we can currently claim exists. For this reason we have humbly and respectfully submitted this iconic tree to the National Register of Big Trees to reign during its remaining years as the largest of its species. May it proudly uphold the memories of its fallen companions until once again a worthy contender brings forth the challenge.

Will Blozan is the President of the Eastern Native Tree Society, and of Appalachian Arborists, Inc.

Eastern Native Tree Society

Find more information about eastern trees and the Tsuga Search Project, and browse hundreds of trip reports and postings on champion trees.

www.nativetreesociety.org

The post The Last of the Giants appeared first on American Forests.