Date: 2006-05-05
From: Blue Mtn Shelter

To: Sassafras Gap
Miles today: 12.2
Weather: light rain

Total miles today 13.9Trail miles today 12.24100 ft of ups3200 ft of downsStart at Blue Mtn ShelterFinish at Sassafras Gap AT mile 60.5Staying in tent   Today was the hardest so far. The climbs and decents of the mountains were about twice as large as they have been on previous days. My knee and feet held up well, but were still pretty sore by the end of the day. But I was pretty pleased. I did finally get a small blister on each heel, but this was as much the fact that it rained hard again and soaked my feet as it was all the big hills.   As most of today was hiking in either a cloud or rain there were not any good views. So I found myself looking at the trees more closely and thinking about how little the forests of today, even back here in the wilderness, resemble the great forests that existed before the arrival of settlers. It is strange and infinitely sad to think that trees which most people think are full grown and large would be dwarfed by those which made up the forests of 1600. Other than a few very remote small groves, which were too hard to get to log, the entire Appalachians have been cut multiple times over the last 400 years. In an old growth forest the trees are mostly tall and straight as the only way for a sapling to survive was to grow towards the sun and to do this it had to compete with trees often above 100 feet tall. The oaks and maples we have planted around our subdivisions more resemble large bushes than their ancient brethren who were sometimes 120 feet tall and 4 feet in diameter! And these were not the tallest trees around then either. Yellow poplar (Tulip Trees) would reach 200 feet as well as a couple of versions of pines. Some of the floor boards in my house are 14 inches wide and 2 inches thick. They are called heart pine and were cut from those giant pine trees which do not exist any more. And then there was the American Chestnut tree which made up 25% of the trees in the forest. This tree frequently covered a half an acre and had as many as a million leaves. Many of these trees were 8 feet in diameter. What a world it must have been.   I believe that if people understood how the world looked and what grew there in ancient times that we could eventually bring them to understand that the earth and nature are not infinite and unchanging. In just the last 10,000 years man has fundamentally altered the entire earth. Almost unimaginable tracts of forest are gone to be replaced by shadows of themselves as in the Appalachians or by pasture and farm land or, even worse by deserts. A significant percentage of the land in the world today that is desert was fertile land only 5 or 6 thousand years ago. Almost all of that loss is due to human actions. Early attempts at irrigation mostly all ended in environmental disaster. Even with the knowledge we have today on how to better manage the risks of irrigating land we still destroy millions of acres every year. Large parts of the Middle East and SW Asia are virtually barren due to failed irrigation schemes and over grazing. The arroyo country of the sw US is an example of failed irrigation by one of the early groups of Native Americans. That county was also once covered by Pinon tree forests which they cut down. Well enough for now. Wyoming   Which way is North?