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The Yonaguska hemlock, formerly the largest known hemlock, now
dead. Photo by Michael Davie
Yonaguska was one of the most prominent chiefs of the East
Cherokees during the first half of the 19th century. Yonaguska
fostered peace but steadfastly refused to agree to the removal of
his portion of the tribe to the west. Later in life, he led his
people in a successful abolition of the use of alcohol.
About the tree: An excerpt from Bob Leverett May 05,
2004: "...takes us back to the earlier days of ENTS
when determining volume of the Smoky Mountain behemoths was a
priority with us. We were fixated on the 1000-cubic-foot monsters,
which promoted Will to climb several huge Smoky Mountain hemlocks
in the Cataloochee district of the Park. We measured one to 1500+
cubic feet. That was the great Yonaguska hemlock. Though no longer
alive, it is still our volume record holder..."
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Bob Leverett
wrote May 19. 2006:
But how does one get good volume modeling data
on trees that top 160 feet,
are sandwiched in among each other,
and are
engulfed in rhododendron hells?
Will decided that there was just
one way
to get valid data. He would climb a
hemlock and measure its
circumference at intervals of a yard or meter. He
initially
climbed what
we later named the Yonaguska hemlock and taped its
height at 168.9
feet.....
He took circumference measurements at intervals of 3 feet.
On the climb up Yoni, Will was presented with a special challenge.
About
75 feet up, the big tree splits into two trunks. So Will had to
measure
both trunks for us to compute a total volume. In addition, the
shape of
the fused area was obviously not circular. It couldn’t be
ignored
because it contained a lot of wood.
Will and I developed an archetype Excel spreadsheet model to
process the
data from the climb. We toyed with different trunk shapes and
eventually
settled on a calculation that set the great hemlock’s trunk
volume to
1458 cubic feet. Adding something for limb volume brought the tree
to
over 1500 cubes. Courtesy of Will’s climbing prowess, we had
entered a
new era of consciousness about the volumes of eastern trees.
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