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