Hunting Our Heritage Trees

America’s ancient forests once stretched uncut from coast to coast—from Eastern white pines to Pacific redwoods

America’s ancient forests once stretched uncut from coast to coast—from Eastern white pines to Pacific redwoods—but as the nation grew and land was cleared, most of the trees were lost. Yet here and there some survived, and these old-growth forests remain today as an almost mystical part of our nation’s heritage.

The day is chilly, but the cold doesn’t deter a small band of hikers winding its way through the Mohawk Trail State Forest in western Massachusetts. The group is led by Bob Leverett, whose campaign to document and protect ancient forests has earned him the moniker “Evangelist of Old Growth.” Today’s mission: to map the “Trees of Peace” trail, which winds past several white pines named for American Indian tribal leaders, the tallest of them reaching more than 162 feet.

“The white pine signifies peace among many tribes,” Leverett says. “But it was the Iroquois who are said to have ‘buried the hatchet’ in a white pine to end tribal feuding.”

The bushwacking brings the group to a massive, contorted grapevine, dangling from a branch 50 feet above to the boulders below. Its stem, 26 inches around, alerts the group that ahead, steeply up slope, lies something special: an ancient forest, undisturbed by humans for centuries.

The first impression is of clutter. A giant bowl carved into the hillside holds craggy boulders. The crevasses between them, plunging 30 feet, offer shelter to black bears. Scattered “snags”—dead, snapped-off trunks of trees—are pocked with holes left by pileated woodpeckers digging for bugs. Green moss and blue lichen carpet everything.

Secure among these glacial relics are white ash, sugar maple, and hemlock trees, some 300 years old. They persist here because the steep, rock-strewn slope has made logging difficult or impossible.

Navigating the hillside and boulders is made tricky by decaying “deadfall” trees and limbs, and while the hillside appears half dead, it’s actually teeming with life, from the tiniest soil organisms to the creatures of the canopy. Time is a physical presence here. One is silent and reverent.

Aware of the mood the forest has evoked, Leverett says to no one in particular, “This is the magic of old growth.”

Leverett’s love of old trees began as a child when he grew up in the shadow of the Great Smoky Mountains. But it wasn’t until his son, Rob, began to take an interest in old-growth forests as a college student that Leverett focused on these ancient stands.

“Rob lamented that they’d be lost and no one would care,” Leverett recalls. “It presented me with a challenge as a father, a way to show him and myself that one person could make a difference.”

In 1988, father and son made their first “discovery” of a stand of 300-year-old hemlocks in the Cold River area of Mohawk Trail State Forest. His findings were published by the Massachusetts Forestry Association, and that “opened the floodgates,” Leverett says. He was inundated with calls from those seeking other such stands.

Since then, Leverett and colleague Gary Beluzo have scoured Massachusetts for additional forest remnants, painstakingly measuring and taking core samples (to determine a tree’s age by its annual growth rings). Their efforts thus far have documented 3,000 acres of old-growth forest in the state.

This came as a surprise to many because wholesale land clearing had denuded much of the eastern landscape by the mid-1800s. In the Northeast, as much as 80 percent of the land was deforested, spawning a belief that ancient forests could not have endured. Some did endure, however; they just weren’t easy to find.

By contrast, the towering Redwoods and Douglas firs of the Pacific Northwest have been in the public eye for more than a century, and took on almost mythical proportions.

“The old-growth movement pretty much started here,” says University of Washington old-growth research associate Dr. Robert Van Pelt. That was due in large part to the influence of such people as American naturalist John Muir and conservation advocate and forester Gifford Pinchot.

The public image of 350-foot trees in the Northwest was underscored in the 1980s when conservationists championed the spotted owl, a bird dependant on old-growth trees.

Since then, some 2 million acres of Eastern old-growth forests have been documented by researchers across the country. In the upper Midwest—Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan—more than 810,000 acres of old growth are recognized as such. This is about 1.1 percent of what grew before European settlement, according to Dr. Lee Frelich, a University of Minnesota researcher. Here the trees are modest in size compared to those of the Northwest.

“Typical 200-to-400-year-old hemlocks and sugar maples are 2 to 3 feet in diameter and 100 to 110 feet tall,” Frelich says. “White pines reach maximum diameters of 6 feet and heights of 167 feet.”

In the southern Appalachian Mountains, about 150,000 acres of old growth are protected within the half-million-acre Great Smoky Mountains National Forest. Described as “the pinnacle of biological diversity” among the world’s temperate places, these dense and complex forests support trees that can reach 600 years and 180 feet tall. Aiding in their longevity is a long growing season and the fact that the land was never stripped of topsoil by advancing glaciers, says Prof. William Martin, director of the University of Eastern Kentucky’s Division of Natural Areas.

“It’s hard to characterize old growth in the East because there are many different forest types and they vary from place to place,” Martin says.

The definition of old growth itself is elusive. Such a forest generally has old, big trees, snags, and deadfalls. But it also has younger trees whose moment in the sun came from gaps left in the canopy by natural disturbances such as storms or lightning strikes. The woodland will have little or no evidence of human interference.

“There’s no threshold of passage,” Leverett says. “It’s like trying to define when someone becomes a senior citizen.”

Leverett’s efforts have earned him citizen activist honors from the Massachusetts Audubon Society and the New England Wildflower Society, but his interest in ancient forests is fueled mostly by the sense of history they impart.

“Trees that were alive in the 1700s are living benchmarks,” Leverett says. “I feel a connection through them that I can’t get by looking at something in a museum.”

His wife, Jani, a Cherokee-Choctaw, explains that American Indians saw the ancient forests as places to be used, not abused. “With their heads in the sky and their feet in the earth, it’s clear they have a relationship with everything here on earth,” she says. “Without them we wouldn’t be alive, so we honor them with prayers.”

Beyond the “living history” they represent, old-growth forests are home to a complex web of plants and animals where organisms may hold the key to disease and other of nature’s mysteries. And the forest’s longevity provides a standard against which the health of other forests can be measured.

But there’s something else, something intangible, that these ancient ecosystems offer.

“As important as anything else is the sense of peace and tranquility these forests provide,” Leverett says. “Anything that slows people down and makes them reflect is a good thing. Old growth does that.”

Some trees count their age in centuries, and a number of species in this country can boast that kind of longevity.

In Michigan, elms may reach 300 years, and white ash 450 or more, while the Joshua tree, found in the deserts and high mountain plains of the Southwest, may live to be 900.

In the intermountain West, junipers may exceed ages of 1,000, with one Western juniper aged 1,600 years. But of them all, the longest lived are bristlecone pines, which may be the oldest living trees on Earth.

In Inyo National Forest on the east side of the Sierra Nevada, some bristlecone pines have survived for more than 40 centuries—with the oldest found so far, named Methuselah, more than 4,700 years old—more ancient than the pyramids of Egypt.

Massachusetts resident Gayle Goddard-Taylor likes to camp and ramble in the woods.

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