Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1888-05-31
IN A REDWOOD FOREST.
The Marvellous Great Trees Found in Ger
tain Sections of California.

The tourists and sight-seer. as well
as the capitalists. can spend week no
where more proftably than in visiting
that most wonderful forest growth in
the world, the redwoods of northwest
ern California. says Santa Rosa letter
in the Louisville C0urierJ0urRGl. There
are small groups in Mariposa and
Calaveras counties, in the Sierra Nevada
mountains. and more extensive areas
in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties,
along the coast south of San Francisco,
but the only considerable forests avail
able for commercial and local build
ing purposes extend from the Oregon
line south about four hundred miles.
The belt varies in width from twenty
to Il hundred miles. One popularity
OF it is its abrupt beginning at the Ore
gon line and ending at the Russian
river in Sonoma county. From this
body Of timber California is mainly
supplied with building and fencing
material, and vast quantities are ship
ped by steamers and sailing-vessels to
Australia, New Zealand, and the ISL
ands of the Pacific, and by rail to sew
eral sections of the United States.
Hundreds of saw-miIls and thousands
Of aX-men and lOggers are engaged in
the work of destroying these forests.
and converting the mighty trees into
lumber and shingles for the use of men
who inhabit the timberless regions.
Eureka, a seapOrtin Humboldt county,
and Guerniville, the terminus of a
branch of the San Francisco and North
Pacific railroad in Sonoma county,
seventy-two miles from San Francisco,
are the centers of the numbering indus
try, from each of which many million
feet of the manufactured article are an
nually shipped. The march of the
army of ax-men and sawyers keep pace
with the extension of railroads. But
it will be several decades, perhaps a
century, before the present growth is
consumed, and as the redwood is a
rapid grower and producer, there will
in that time bea suffciency of younger
growth to supply local demands at
least.
A tramp through redwood forest
affects one with a sense of fear, lOneli-
ness, and littleness. The writer accom-
panied by the manager of milling
company of GuerniviIle, recently took
q half-day's ramble through the big
tree reservation, beginning one and a
half mile west of that place. No ade-
quate idea can be conveyed of the i'm
pressions received by ''tenderfoot''
in the center of forest where such
gigantic trees stand in solid phalanX.
Three trees, selected at random in diff
ferent parts of the forest, measured re-
spectively eighty, seventy-six, and sew
enty-four feet in circumference six feet
above the roots, and the first branches
appeared to be at least $50 feet above
the ground, to which point there is no
apparent dimunition of size. A COM
pariSon of those standing with others
of equal size and height that had been
felled proved them to be more than $50
feet from root to topmost leaf. To see
an isolated tree of such proportions is
an interesting spectacle, but to be in a
narrow path where they are in such
proximity to each other as to momen-
experience, yet a strangely pleasurable
one.
In the early morning the solemn
stiffness is only broken by the faint
call of squirrels retreating into or
emerging from their homes, hundreds
of feet above YOU, or the twitter of the
innumerable birds as they futter in the
topmost branches. But when the
ocean breeze of the afternoon sweeps
with violence through the thickly-in-
terwoYen branches overhead. there is
a commingling of sound so fascinating
and yet so unearthly that the immagin-
alton easily distorts them into music
from voices and harps in spirit land.
These forests, besides furnishing the
agriculturists in adjacent valleys and
foot hills abundant and cheap building
and fencing material, perform another
important function. The leaves absorb
the chilling moisture of the sea breeze
in summer and break the force of the
northwest wind in winter. This is
very important consideration with
wOol-grOwers and dairymen in the
openings, and with fruit-growers and
yineyardists in the adjacent valleys
and foothills. The forest protects the
former from extreme cold in winter
and the latter from late frosts in the
spring.
The rcdwoods are not continuous
over the territory called the Redwood
region" They occupy it in groups
and forests, leaving wide stretches of
mountain and tableland on which
grass grows luXuriously several months
of the year, and then curling in the
hot sun becomes nutritious hay. Lands
denuded of redwood trees are also soon
covered with grass between the stumps.