appalachianphotojournal:Stop #4 on my Thursday road trip: Cathedral State Park, just outside of Auro
appalachianphotojournal:Stop #4 on my Thursday road trip: Cathedral State Park, just outside of Aurora, West Virginia.“When all the trees have been cut down, when all the animals have been hunted, when all the waters are polluted, when all the air is unsafe to breathe, only then will you discover you cannot eat money.”-Cree ProphecyCathedral State Park protects one of the last remaining virgin hemlock forests in the eastern United States. Some of the giant hemlocks in this forest were growing when the first white settlers moved into mountains from the east. That this tiny parcel of forest survived the subsequent onslaught of the timber industry at the turn of the 20th Century is a small miracle. While most of the old growth forest around it was cut down, and the resulting fires and floods devastated vast tracts of the Appalachian mountains, a thoughtful landowner named Branson Haas purchased the property that would become Cathedral State Park in 1942 and protected until he sold it to the State of West Virginia under the condition that it never be cut down. It is a place of enormous beauty and spiritual power. It is a bittersweet irony that, having miraculously survived the carnage wrought by the timber industry at the turn of the last century, the forest now faces another threat of similar magnitude: the hemlock woolly adelgid. North American hemlocks have no resistance to this insect pest imported from Asia. It has been rapidly spreading through and killing off the hemlock forests of the United States. The time of these great trees may well be over. -- source link
#nature#appalachia#west virginia#hemlock tree