vandaliatraveler:“When all the trees have been cut down, when all the animals have been hunted, when
vandaliatraveler:“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 virgin hemlock forests still standing in the central Appalachians. Some of the giant hemlocks in this forest were saplings when the first colonists reached the United States from Europe. This tiny parcel of forest was lucky to have survived the timber industry’s clear-cutting onslaught at the turn of the 20th Century. After most of the old growth forest around it was cut down, and the resulting fires and floods had 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 be preserved as is for future generations. Despite US Route 50 running through part of it, the park is amazingly serene and quiet, save for the occasional creaking of hemlock boughs high in the canopy, chipmunks bouncing through the undergrowth, and the bubbling and gurgling of a small stream that meanders through the park on its way to the Youghiogheny River. The miracles protected by Cathedral State Park are both large and small: hemlocks and hardwoods towering well over a hundred feet above root-strangled trails and moist mats of green moss lit up by the incandescent red fruit of partridge berry. It is a place of enormous beauty and spiritual power.Bittersweet irony then that this hemlock forest, having miraculously survived the carnage wrought by the timber industry at the turn of the last century, now faces another threat of extinction, this time from a tiny insect known as the hemlock woolly adelgid. North American hemlocks have no natural resistance to this insect pest imported from Asia. The adelgid invasion has been rapidly spreading through and killing the hemlock forests of the Eastern United States since the 1980′s. Time may well be running out for these irreplaceable conifers. -- source link
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#tsuga canadensis#hemlock tree#appalachia#woolly adelgid#invasive species