[HN Gopher] A photographer captures life in America's last remai...
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A photographer captures life in America's last remaining old-growth
forests
Author : toomuchtodo
Score : 120 points
Date : 2024-09-03 15:06 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| Looks a lot like the forest in Nova Scotia, the part thats not
| effected by lumberjacks.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| The PNW has an incredible beauty that is hard to describe. I grew
| up a few miles from Yosemite, so I've had a lot of exposure to
| wild, natural landscapes, but these old growth rainforests are
| something else entirely.
|
| That said, I do feel conflicted about this type of forest
| management. It may work on the Olympic Peninsula where risk of
| fire is minimal. It does not work in the large forests of
| California which are tinder-dry and experience very hot summers.
| urda wrote:
| The PNW has a beauty that is completely unmatched by the rest of
| the country. It just cannot be beat.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| Americans, as one of my European friends related, live in a
| beautiful country but don't really appreciate how beautiful it
| really is.
|
| Btw, I will check your PNW and raise you the Green Mountains in
| VT and White Mountains in NH during the fall.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I drove from North Dakota to Kentucky earlier this summer and
| was really surprised at how beautiful some parts of Missouri
| and Southern Illinois are. That's an area I never heard
| anyone talk about, but I'd like to go on an extended camping
| trip there in the spring.
| Carrok wrote:
| > don't really appreciate how beautiful it really is.
|
| Pretty broad statement to make about a country of 300+
| million people.
|
| Especially in a thread of people appreciating it.
| swasheck wrote:
| my, admittedly colloquial, observations that nuance your
| european friend's perspective is that, in general, europeans
| appreciate the size and environmental and ecological
| diversity that exists in north america. people from the us
| who visit europe and rave about its beauty seem to be smitten
| by european culture (cities, history, architecture).
|
| again, obviously this is colloquial and not everyone will fit
| neatly into one of those two categories, but as i've traveled
| around the various continents, that's the _general_ theme i
| detect in conversations.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| That was exactly my friend's point.
| Arrath wrote:
| > Btw, I will check your PNW and raise you the Green
| Mountains in VT and White Mountains in NH during the fall.
|
| I've long been unimpressed with the ancient and eroded
| 'mountains' of the East when set against the tall and
| imposing Mountains of the West. The Rockies and Cascades just
| hit different.
| klondike_klive wrote:
| My partner and I visited a few years ago during the fall when
| my son was a few months old. It was beautiful, (and I'm
| partially red-green colour blind so couldn't fully appreciate
| the leaves' colours.) Coincidentally I recently discovered
| that an ancestor of mine, great or great-great- grandfather,
| declared his birthplace as Quechee, VT which we visited and
| where I proposed to my gf at Quechee Gorge.
| susiecambria wrote:
| Good on ya for choosing such a lovely spot. I LOVE Quechee
| Gorge and visited often when I lived in Connecticut and
| Massachusetts. Now in Virginia, it's way too long a drive.
| zwieback wrote:
| This time of the year I'm inclined to agree but come February
| I'm ready to head south...
| mynameisash wrote:
| I recognize not everyone likes the rain and gloom, but I do
| find it interesting and kind of amusing how many of us --
| myself included -- really love it and thrive in that kind of
| weather. The 85degF and sunny we had the last few days was
| really wearing me down.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Unfortunately there is not much old growth left. A lot of the
| forest you see in Idaho, Washington, Oregon is too dense to
| resemble how the forests used to be. The spread of trees was
| more sparse historically, with bigger and taller trees (whose
| canopy prevented other growth underneath). It's actually a part
| of why wildfires are a bigger problem now - dense forests means
| easier spreading of infestations (which create dry fuel) and
| also easier spreading of fires.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| The Hoh rain forest is one of the most beautiful places I've had
| the chance to visit. Sadly, I had to cut the camping trip short
| because I am highly allergic to whatever pollen or spores were in
| the air.
|
| I suspect it was fern spores that I had an allergic reaction to,
| because I had a similar experience in an area of New South Wales
| that has a lot of ferns.
|
| It still turned out to be a great trip. We drove up to Seattle,
| stopped at El Chupacabra, then went out to North Cascades
| National Park for a couple of days before heading home.
|
| Washington is such a beautiful state with so much diversity in
| the landscape. I love driving through the state from East to West
| because you see it all. Even better, I flew from Seattle to
| Minneapolis once and it was a clear sunny day for the whole trip.
| The view out the window was breathtaking and seeing the landscape
| change from forest to desert to forest to prairie and farmland
| was just the coolest thing. And flying over the mountains and
| seeing lakes up there all secluded. Beautiful.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Cedars throw off a ton of pollen. I shook a limb once at UW and
| it was like tossing a cup of flower in the air. I moved here
| from the midwest and the cedars get me every year.
| londons_explore wrote:
| One really notices that old untouched forests are pretty much
| _impassable_ on foot.
|
| There are no footpaths, the undergrowth is both dense but also
| strong - we aren't talking stuff you can push aside.
| throwup238 wrote:
| That depends on the exact type of forest. The PNW is very wet
| so fire don't clear the underbrush but in the South West, that
| growth only has a few decades to build up before its burned
| away.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Of course you have to match the management to the local
| environment, I think that's a pretty well understood concept
| among the people who do that management these days.
| bluGill wrote:
| That is NOT a natural situation in general. Forests in North
| America normally have regular small fires that clear out that
| undergrowth. Often the natives would light fires as well every
| year. However with misguided fire policy those fires have not
| existed for a long time and now any fire will take out the
| whole forest.
|
| Each forest is different. The above is a general guideline, but
| consult a proper forester for information on any particular
| forest and what the natural state should be!
| rtkwe wrote:
| There are many parts of the PNW that get enough rain yearly
| to qualify as a rain forest so naturally fires are going to
| be pretty rare in those areas. It'll rarely get ~~wet~~ dry
| enough to burn.
| jesseendahl wrote:
| You mean rarely _dry_ enough to burn, right?
| rtkwe wrote:
| (post edit) What ever do you mean? It doesn't look like
| anything to me...
|
| Of course that's what I meant though.
| throwup238 wrote:
| You're thinking of forests in California and the rest of the
| Southwest
|
| Many (most?) PNW forests sit on very deep peatlands. When
| they burn, it's a catastrophic release of captured carbon
| like the fires Canada has been experiencing over the last few
| years. Once those fires start, it becomes a vicious cycle of
| fire drying out deeper peat which burns the next fire season,
| sometimes smoldering underground for years before burning
| out.
| bparsons wrote:
| Temperate rainforests are different. They have very small
| spot fires from lightning, but the underlying foliage
| generally never burns. Fungi does the work of clearing out
| the dead material.
| magneticnorth wrote:
| Huh, I had noticed much the opposite.
|
| Second growth forests that have been left untouched for 20 or
| more years are complete snarls. Young trees are more likely to
| fall down in a storm, and the open canopy lets in enough sun
| that you get all kinds of dense undergrowth amid the fallen
| trees.
|
| But the PNW old growth forests have such a dark tree canopy
| that not much other than moss and ferns grow below. The 1000+
| year old trees rarely fall down, so you don't have as much
| fallen logs, either. It's a pretty incredible experience to
| walk through a mossy forest of giants like that.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Pristine forests in central Africa are the opposite of that.
| patall wrote:
| Why would there be no footpaths, where do all the deer, moose,
| foxes, wolves and lynx go? I am always 'surprised' how many
| such trails exist in any kind of surrounding. Sure, its often
| difficult to follow, but that's because we are not used to them
| anymore.
| lacker wrote:
| That depends on the type of tree.
|
| An old growth redwood forest, for example, will often have
| large areas with no trees except redwoods. The bottom ten feet
| of the forest, where you walk around, can be nothing except
| smooth vertical trunks, with a thick covering of needles on the
| ground. No undergrowth at all, because the bottom of the forest
| lives in permanent shade, and the redwoods change the chemical
| balance of the soil in a way that makes it hard for other
| plants to grow.
| tantalor wrote:
| There are actually lots of old-growth forests you can visit.
|
| Check out https://www.oldgrowthforest.net/network-forests
| bradford wrote:
| It's a great site, but I don't think many of the listings could
| be properly categorized as old-growth. For example, I checked
| out a few samples:
|
| "The oldest trees are estimated to be over 200 years old."
| https://www.oldgrowthforest.net/md-schoolhouse-woods
|
| "The age of the oldest trees is not certain, but 100 rings have
| been counted on a downed loblolly pine and a downed chestnut
| oak. There is no old-growth forest in this park, however, the
| strong protections put in place on this forest ensure that it
| may recover in time." https://www.oldgrowthforest.net/va-james-
| river-park-system
|
| (The exact definition of old-growth isn't agreed on, but I've
| seen some foresty documents in the PNW that demand tree age of
| 400+ years as a prerequisite for the old-growth categorization)
| karaterobot wrote:
| I had always thought of an old-growth forest as less defined
| by the age of the trees, and more by the lack of human
| management/disturbance. I think of old growth as being in
| comparison to a second-growth forest, which had been logged
| and replanted. I'm not a forestry scientist, just cobbling
| definitions together as I go. But it seems unfair to say you
| could never have an old growth forest of aspen--a species
| where individual trees only live about 100 years--if the
| forest itself had been untouched since the dawn of time.
| throwup238 wrote:
| It's not about the age of the individual trees but the
| overall forest since it was last disturbed by humans (on a
| large scale like logging or agriculture).
|
| Age matters because there are several "thresholds" during
| which the diversity of species significantly increases and
| that starts with the older trees falling and decomposing.
| The conifers in the PNW take anywhere from 50-150 years to
| decompose before they start breaking apart and littering
| the forest floor. Once the first generation of trees is
| broken up and spread around by the wildlife and the fungi
| species are fully established, the growth of
| third/fourth/fifth generation of trees and plants become a
| lot more vigorous. When the second and third generation of
| trees start falling, they end up creating the dense
| habitats that supports large food webs from the rodents on
| up. All the while, the tree roots pull nutrients from
| deeper and deeper in the earth, allowing the rain and cold
| to build up a layer of peat on the forest floor that cycles
| and stores the nutrients, improving the quality of the
| dirt.
|
| It just takes a while for all these processes to build up.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The east and southeast don't have many ultra-long-lived tree
| species, outside of cypresses [0].
|
| I think most oaks top out ~100 years and pines ~200. Not as
| much slow-growth, live-forever stuff.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxodium_distichum
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Oaks easily go to 500y, sometimes up to 1000!
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I suppose they are the exception tho since 500 year old
| oaks are likely to be famous. Airlie Oak in Wilmington NC
| is one I know of.
|
| https://www.starnewsonline.com/story/news/2009/06/13/airl
| ie-...
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Right! I guess they are exceptions because we cut them
| before eldery, not because biological reasons. Cows older
| than 4yo are an exception because we slaughter most of
| them before but they could live 5 times more.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Is that true?
|
| I thought super-long-lived trees tended to have special
| biological optimizations to persist over centuries.
|
| E.g. https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/shirley
| /sec6.ht...
| Diederich wrote:
| Last night, just before full darkness, I was walking through the
| woods around our home in rural western Washington state and quite
| suddenly I'm looking at a surprised black bear. It was perhaps 4
| meters away and immediately stood up and started huffing. I
| shouted at it and calmly walked away.
|
| We don't live in a true old-growth forest, but it's pretty close.
| There are definitely many hundred year old trees.
|
| We manage our five acres very, very minimally, and we're actively
| re-foresting most of the ~1ac of yards that were mowed prior to
| us moving here in 2020.
|
| As another commenter said, this is the most beautiful natural
| environment I've ever seen, and we're extremely grateful that
| this has become our forever home.
| marapuru wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this encounter and for re-foresting the
| land.
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(page generated 2024-09-03 23:01 UTC)