Mount Rogers hemlocks.   James Smith
  Oct 10, 2006 06:07 PDT 

My wife and I spend a lot of time camping in National Forest campgrounds.
We'd been wanting to try out Hurricane Campground in the Mount Rogers
National Recreation Area. I highly recommend it for general hiking, but
not much in the way of old trees.

However, the area has a LOT of hemlocks. I talked to the campground host
about them, and was informed that the state of Virginia is treating the
hemlock groves around all of their parks and National Forest campgrounds
with root-injected adelgicide. They treat each area every other year.
The hemlocks at Hurricane were obviously infested, but the host told me
that the treatment was working and that there was new growth on the
trees this year. The state treated over 1,000 trees in that campground
alone. If you hike into the forest just a bit, you can see lots of dead
and dying hemlocks that were not treated. He also told me that they were
treating Beartree Recreation Area this week. I'd like to see them at
work.

At any rate, I thought you folk would be interested in what the state of
Virginia is trying to do about preserving the hemlocks in their
campgrounds and recreation areas.