| 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. |
|