South Fork, Part 1

Back to forests. With this post we are introducing a new category: Forest Examples. We have defined forests and examined a few of their features. To get an even better feel for the organism we shall attempt to describe some actual forests that really exist today.

Far up the west slope of the Oregon Cascades, on a south-leaning bench at 3,000 feet, there exists a fragment of a forest I call South Fork. Bounded on three sides by clearcut plantations, South Fork is still tenuously connected to other remnants of uncut, unburned, “original” forest. South Fork is not a discrete stand, so it’s acreage cannot be specified. South Fork is a place, a recondite, forested place.

Several years ago I spent part of a summer studying South Fork, taking plots, coring trees, and generally figuring it out. We’ll present some statistical data in the next post. First, however, I want to convey the flavor, the ambiance, the gestalt of the place.

South Fork could be classified as “mixed conifer”, but the overwhelming majority of the trees are grand fir. A veritable wall of grand fir greets the visitor who approaches through one of the adjacent clearcuts. Tall gray columns are arrayed in an imposing row like a stockade barrier. In fact it is an artificial edge, the trees are deep-forest-grown, and ever since the clearcut the edge trees have been exposed and embarrassed.

Once inside South Fork the light diminishes and colors fade to shades of gray. The trees are medium-tall, most 60 to 100 feet with a few over 130 feet. Their green and leafy crowns are far overhead, and there is little or no vegetation on the forest floor. The predominant colors at eye-level are the grays of grand fir bark plastered on innumerable plumb-vertical trunks. Because there are no small trees or brush, one can see a long ways through the dim forest. And all one can see (at first) are gray grand fir trunks standing at attention like terracotta soldiers in a Chinese emperor’s tomb.

Most of the trees are one to two feet in diameter. Hold your hands out in front of you, thumbs up. That’s how fat the trees are at breast height, 4.5 feet above ground level.

You can’t walk through South Fork; instead you must clamber. The forest floor is a jumble of fallen trees, a giant pixie-stick jungle-gym of out-competed grand fir mortality. To get from point A to point B in South Fork one must climb up, over, under, and around the debris. Caulked boots scrape away loose gray bark from the snag falls, revealing the yellow-white decaying wood underneath. Also white are the golf ball conks of fungus that polka dot the gray scenery.

As one clambers around South Fork one is sure to encounter an anomalous tree here and there. Hopping over yet another snarl of fallen fir, you suddenly come face-to-base with an enormous, purple, alligator-barked monstrosity: a six-foot diameter sugar pine (extend your arms out sideways to get a feel for a six-foot girth). The sugar pine is limb and knot free for 60 feet, and the gnarled top is 180 feet up there, towering over the grand firs.

As you clamber some more, another giant swings into view. This time the donniker is a huge ponderosa pine, its orange bark a burst of color in the dingy forest. Gradually you realize these giant trees are all around, though widely-spaced. From any one spot, turning a 360 degree panorama, you can see two or three trees that are much bigger than the thousand or so other trees blocking your view.

The giants are old sugar and ponderosa pines, Douglas-firs, incense cedars, and occasional grand firs. Their bark is thick and deeply incised. The limbs, high up where they start, are as big around as small trees and project out 30 feet or more from the trunks. The tree tops are broken and seem to form flat-topped platforms high above the forest. The bases of the monster trees are mulched two feet deep in bark sheddings and cone chips.

These giant trees are different in every respect from the thin-barked, pin-cushion-limbed, short, skinny thicket of grand firs that make up 99 percent of the tree count. To the forester trying to figure out the forest, these giant old trees present a conundrum: how did they get here?

It’s obvious that South Fork is a fire trap. All the clambering over crisscrossed firewood logs made our forester feel like an ant on a bonfire pile just before it’s lit. On hot summer days the air is redolent with turpenes, resins, and aromatic hydrocarbons. It’s been a little creepy actually; all afternoon our fire-tested forester keeps one eye on the shortest mad-dash path to the road, just in case one of the compost piles of woody debris spontaneously combusts. It is abundantly clear that South Fork, when it burns, will burn like the inside of a pottery kiln. Any fire in this forest will burn so hot it will mortalize every tree in it, including the big punkins.

The puzzle is this: if South Fork is untouched original forest subject only to the forces of nature, i.e. catastrophic fire, then how did the punkins arise in the first place? If the natural forest is a pitch-soaked thicket of short-lived, decadence-prone grand fir primed for regular, periodic “stand replacement” fires, then how did some trees, mostly not grand fir, get there and grow so big?

Coming next: The Secret of the Rings