Ancient forests like this are not too rare in the United States. You can find a list of them here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_old-growth_forests#Uni...
Disclosure: I compiled most of the list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_old-growth_forests#Uni...
Disclosure: I compiled most of the list.
It's also cheesy that the wiki list gives the size of the park reserve rather than the size of the actual old growth stand. The full article gives the much smaller size of 49 acres of remaining old growth forest rather than the 9,642 acres given in the list.
People estimate that the Michigan lumber boom was larger (in value extracted) than the California gold rush. They cut down almost everything.
Probably an overzealous editor. I haven't checked the edit logs for that page in years. Feel free to correct it.
What does discovery have anything to do with it? The article makes a different claim.
> What we now call “old-growth” forests are simply communities of trees that have been allowed to continue on undisturbed while most of the forest around them has been thinned or cut down entirely. In North America, even places that look thickly forested to us now are often full of relatively young trees, regrown on patches of land that were farms not so long ago.
I recently visited Cook Forest [1] in northwest Pennsylvania and it is breathtakingly beautiful. It's not just quantitatively different (bigger trees) but also qualitatively -- all towering evergreens in a very deciduous state. It's really sobering to think of how much we lost by clearcutting before we started to think about conservation seriously in the last 120 years or so.
I've hiked there a bit myself!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/miguelvieira/6142136271/
Most of my data came from Eastern Old-Growth Forests by Mary Bird Davis. She defined old growth as forests that were never logged or that are so old that there is no longer any evidence of logging.
The thing with many eastern forests is that because of either their species composition or their site conditions (soil, climate, etc), their trees will never get very large.
What I remember about the Smokies is that no one knew exactly how much they were logged, but the National Park Service estimated about 60 to 70 percent. Most of the remaining unlogged forests won't really have huge trees. In fact, some huge tulip trees that are popular hiking destinations are less than two hundred years old, while small hemlocks on ridges can be over three hundred years old.
I guess I was mostly thinking about the general conception a lot of people tend to have that when they go to something like a national park (particularly in the east), that it's been completely untouched by time, when in fact we had fairly indiscriminate industry and war that giant swathes of places that were only received protections in the early 20th century and beyond.
Oh, and if we're sharing pics of big/interesting trees I would be remiss to skip the road trip where I was fortunate enough to see fat trees[1], dead trees[2], and rare trees[3].
[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/23215983@N02/26863377690/in/da...
[2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/23215983@N02/26863377830/in/da...
[3] https://www.flickr.com/photos/23215983@N02/27069305001/in/da...