Time Travel

[athabascae]

Ha. Where I live the trees are toothpicks compared to your white pine!

[connyro]

As usual, great stuff LC!

they were not using Hemlock for any commercial purposes, so the ones that were hard to get to at the top of ridges were left.

Not sure about the Northern Great Lakes Region- in the Northeast, eastern hemlock stands were harvested intensively for the tannin found in hemlock bark. In the extreme northeast ( i.e. at hemlock's northern limit), such as New Brunswick, and northern Maine- hemlock never recovered from this intensive harvesting (i.e. the hemlock stands did not regenerate with hemlock- they became spruce-fir-hardwood forests).

Eastern hemlock timber is heavy, strong and durable- but it is brittle. It generally makes much better large dimension timbers than construction-grade lumber. But some of the most beautiful flooring I've ever seen is clear, hemlock flooring in farm houses, in western Nova Scotia (which is warm enough to be hemlock country). I have used hemlock primarily in bridge building.

I hear you regarding the tannin in the Hemlock bark! It was not widely used in this part of the country around that time: they had already come up with an artificial tannin by the time they cut out here. They left them mainly because, like you mentioned, they are brittle and not useful for pulp. We use it here, again like you mentioned, for temporary bridge building (stream crossings for hauling logs, etc). We either use rough cut hemlock or crane mats or a combination of both.
I would love to see hemlock flooring; that's something I've never seen before! We installed some tongue and groove jack pine for the floor of our ski cabin. It's beautiful and durable.

Hemlocks don't let anything else grow nearby, so we get these almost cathedral-like micro-stands with little if any underbrush or diversity. We've got a few of these old growth groves throughout the property.
Hemlock-dominated stands are allelopathic when they are "young"- inhibiting tree and shrub regeneration. As hemlock stands get really old, the allelopathy diminishes as canopy gaps form- allowing thickets of regeneration to establish. It may be hard to believe, but a dense, closed-canopy hemlock stand (with an open understory) is still relatively young (even if the trees are "old"). Eventually, hemlock stands begin to break up as very old trees gradually die- the stand enters a truly old development stage and becomes multi-aged and full of canopy gaps.

This is some great and interesting info LC! Thanks. It makes sense, as we have old hemlock trees but also a great deal of mixed "H-9" type stands with hardwoods mixed in with many young and old hemlocks. Amongst these stands are enormous dead and fallen old stems from old hemlocks.

The most productive sugar maple sites in the world are in the northern Great Lakes region- nutrient-rich, fine-textured soils, combined with a hot humid growing season.

In the Maritimes, the climate and soils are less ideal for sugar maple (the best sites are in northwestern NB). Yellow birch on the other hand loves the cool, humid climate. Yellow birch in our region can grow to over 2 meters in diameter, and up to 400 years old. We used to have spectacular beech trees in our forests that have been decimated by beech scale disease.

We've got a lot of hard maple stands here due to the glacial till and gravels left behind from retreating glaciers and lowering lake level. Our specific landform consists of shallow bedrock that rises steeply from Lake Superior, with lots of sand and gravel that fills the valleys and ravines. We get a great deal of precipitation due to orographic lifting and lake-effect. Our summers here are generally not hot due to the Lake's influence.

My area here was mostly clear-cut 100+ years ago, so there's quite a bit of yellow birch here too. The left some 'seed trees' that you stumble across every now and then: huge yellow birch. Our beech are slowly succumbing to disease as well, but it has not moved to our rather isolated patch of beech here yet. Our mixed "M-9" stands consist of mostly sugar maple, soft maple (red) , and lots of yellow birch. Lesser amounts of red oak, white birch, black ash, beech, hornbeam and evergreens (spruce, hemlock, cedar, white/red pine, Douglas fir.

[MikeK]

Ha. Where I live the trees are toothpicks compared to your white pine!

Size doesn't matter

Is there still any old growth in the Yukon, or have those forests been logged... or do they just regenerate quicker?

[athabascae]

Very little industrial-type logging has happened in the Yukon (we're too far from the larger sawmills and markets); but, lots of firewood harvesting near communities.

Trees are small here because of the harsh growing conditions, as well as much of the territory has been burned in the last 100-150 years - fires here can be quite spectacular in terms of size and severity. We have even gotten smoke from fires as far away as Siberia and northern China.

Having said that, there are some impressive white spruce in the valley bottoms adjacent to creeks and rivers, and some of the sitka spruce in nearby southeastern Alaska are huge (but, lots of industrial logging in the Tongass National Forest).

Tom