| Webster
County, WV |
Fores-@aol.com |
| Jan
01, 2007 12:33 PST |
Bob:
Happy beginning to '07!
I have lots of thoughts about being able to write something with
some sort
of frequency like you mentioned but so much of my time is out
there.... and, I
don't always get home with leftover ambition at the end of the
day.
I have been spending all of my days for nearly a month working
on a timber
sale in central WV. I have been taking advantage of the fact
that I am able
to work on a project in my shirtsleeves and leather boots in
2007 in a
mountainous location that would have required snow shoes and
lots of wool to stay
warm 30 years ago. If it ain't global warming somebody left the
thermostat on!
Right now, I am working on a timber sale in Webster County, West
Virginia,
the recognized home to some of the most productive hardwood tree
growing land
in eastern North America. The 30 acre area I
just finished working on was
heavily logged at least twice in the last 80 years and I was
measuring many
yellow poplar trees that were 30" chest diameter and over
130' tall. Several
of the best trees had nearly 100 feet of clean stem to the first
live branch.
On the same property the forest is completely different where
the exposures
are to the south. In addition to having large diameter trees of
various
commercially desirable species dominating the overstory, the
forest floor was
littered with the heaps of gray wood and red mush that are the
old chestnut
stumps left from logging that took place between eighty and
ninety years ago.
Some of the "mush" stumps are nearly ten feet across
and I am not confident
they represent the original tree diameter. Where there is a
partial stem still
in evidence four to five foot stumps appeared to be common. What
caught my
attention most was that for several acres it was possible to
notice that the
location of the largest old chestnut stumps was fairly evenly
scattered about
30 feet apart across the hillside, on center. However, I have to
keep
reminding myself that chestnut was not the only tree in the
original forest and
all the other stumps are long gone.
The property is in an old coal mining region and it has numerous
old pits
where residents dug "house coal" in the past. Some of
the pits can be found
carved 20 feet into the mountainside.... in the middle of a 60%
slope that was
once used as a corn field.
Trees in parts of Webster grow exceptionally tall and the
stocking (number
of trees per acre) can be much higher than average. In drier and
less
productive portions of the WV an 80 year old natural woods can
produce as much as
3,000 board feet per acre in quality timber. In
Webster County an 80 year old
hardwood forest can yield from 9,000 to over 20,000 board feet
per acre.
Very little is heard about Webster County from outside the state
because
nearly all the commercial timberland in the county is owned by
private
individuals and families with generations of ownership. There is
almost no NF land in
Webster and very little public land.
If you ever wanted to make a trip to that part of WV to explore
I would
suggest going to Holly River State Park. The entire area was
severely logged in
the 20's and early 30's and has recovered incredibly well. There
are a
couple of trails that are supposed to go to bigger trees but the
land there is so
productive that everything is a lot more than 100 feet tall.
Holly River State Park is probably about 3 hours from
Pittsburgh.
_http://www.hollyriver.com/_
(http://www.hollyriver.com/)
I really want to jot down thoughts from my last work day of 2006
in another
e-mail....I have to finish with my first work day of 2007 first.
Russ
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