Forest and Nature

It’s not often that anyone gets the opportunity to experience an old-growth forest in northeastern Pennsylvania — a forest where the trees are at least 150 years old and reach 100 feet or more above the ground. Probably, less than 1 percent of Pennsylvania’s forests escaped axe, and most of that virgin, untouched woods is in the western part of the state (the biggest remaining virgin tract is 4,000-acre Cook Forest State Park in the Allegheny Forest region).

In the Poconos, a few acres here and there in the steep, rugged ravines of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area contain ancient hemlocks and white pines that were left alone because the terrain was too difficult to lumber. A small tract of private forest at Buck Hill Falls — Jenkins Woods — has never been cut and represents a local showpiece of what the forests of the Poconos once resembled. But, sadly, all of the state parks, forests, games lands and other public woodlands are second- or third-growth remnants of our once-majestic forests.

However, there’s another forest just south of the Poconos that recalls the Pennsylvania of another era. Known as Henry’s Woods, it’s part of Jacobsburg State Environmental Education Center near Wind Gap. Henry’s Woods is named after William Henry II, who produced the famous Henry firearm at a factory there. The old homesite and forge are now designated as National Historic Sites within Jacobsburg Environmental Education Center.

I brought a group to Jacobsburg on April 24, and we walked the two-mile Henry’s Woods loop trail on a fine spring day. Wildflowers such as bloodroot, trout lily and spring beauty added colors of white, yellow and pink to the forest floor, and the songs of Carolina wren, phoebe and towhee echoed through the cathedral-like forest. The jelly-like masses of spotted salamanders in shallow woodland ponds showed that this amphibian had already completed its breeding season.

But the most impressive living things along the scenic streamside trail are trees. Stately hemlocks, white pines, white oaks and red oaks rise to dizzying heights above the forest floor. Trunks are 3 or 4 feet in diameter and spread their branches well over 100 feet above the ground.

The biggest trees of all are the tuliptrees, also called “tulip poplars” (they’re not poplars at all, but rather members of the magnolia family). Some of these monarchs below the trail, close to the creek, have immense trunks 5 feet (or more) wide and as straight as columns. These giants are probably 125 feet tall, ranking them among the tallest trees in this region. (In some of the fertile coves of the southern Appalachians there are tuliptrees nearly 200 feet tall.)

How old is this forest? It’s difficult to guess the age of a tree simply by its size, because trees’ growth rates vary with soil quality, climate and competition. But judging from the annual rings revealed on some of Jacobsburg’s stumps that were cut for recently fallen trees, the biggest trees are more than 200 — and possibly even 300 — years old. This may not seem very ancient when compared to the western sequoias, redwoods and bristlecone pines that exceed 2,000 years, or some of the southern bald cypresses that are 1,000 years old, but it’s impressive for the northeastern United States. Many of the hemlocks in Cook Forest and Jenkins Woods are reported to be 450 years old — about the same age as the oldest trees that have been found in Massachusetts.

Perhaps some of the oaks, hemlocks and tuliptrees at Jacobsburg are also that ancient. One person who is much more qualified than I am to offer an educated guess is Jacobsburg’s own naturalist and old-growth expert, Bill Sweeney. Contact Jacobsburg to find out when Sweeney is leading a walk there — or take the trail on your own to get close to some of the most venerable and impressive living things in our Pocono region.

Source: http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070513/NEWS01/705130322