State officials plan Saturday to propose an 82-acre timber harvest in Pisgah State Park, in southwest New Hampshire.
Officials say they’ve waited decades for the resources to carry out the project, but critics want the state to wait longer.
The Keene Sentinel’s Donna Moxley reports…
On most days, Pisgah State Park sees traffic only from hiking boots, mountain bikes, and ATVs.
Even where old foundations remain from years past, the woods grow tall, surrounding remnants of domestic apple orchards and lilac hedges.
The Park spans nearly 14,000 acres and three New Hampshire towns, Winchester, Chesterfield and Hinsdale.
To put that in perspective, Pisgah is a third larger than the city of Portsmouth, and around the same size as the town of Marlborough.
So as As Ken Desmaris, the administrator of the N.H. Forest Management Bureau, points out, the 82-acre timber cut would directly involve just over half of a percent of the park’s total area.
Desmaris
Desmaris said the timber cut will help create habitat for certain desirable species, mostly migratory bird species.
The location for the logging was chosen by the state to encourage those species to make the park their home.
The money raised from the timber sale will put money back into the park system, he said, though it won’t necessarily go back to Pisgah.
But critics of the proposed cut argue it could harm an area much greater that the simple 82 acres
25:50(Tom 1)
It’s probably the largest undisturbed for a longer period of time and contiguous piece of land in all of central New England. To me that’s pretty special,
Tom Sintros is a science and environmental studies teacher at Keene High School and Keene State College. He and David Moon, of the Ashuelot Valley Environmental Observatory, or AVEO, led a few journalists into the vast Pisgah woods on a recent hot afternoon.
"and to compartmentalize this into small timber sale operations without having an overarching management plan …It’s a large tract of land that if it starts to get disturbed without an overarching plan and vision, there’s no getting it back."
A 20-minute drive from the park’s visitor’s center on the gravel Old Chesterfield Road – near where the logging would be – ended as the road turned into just a footpath.
On this day, a tree marked with fresh bear scratches lined the North Ponds Trail.
A single moose track in a patch of mud, and a skittish orange newt led the way even deeper into the forest.
For the past several hundred years, hemlock, ash, and American chestnut also have lived here, and some of them remain as healthy seniors of the woods.
This isn’t old growth like the stands of looming redwoods out west –
As David Moon points out, these are single, centuries-old giants dominating a wood full of their great-great-great-great offspring.
10:05 (David 1) what you see in an old growth forest is a real mix from all the way from very young trees like these beech saplings with every age in between all the way up to some really large trees. You’ll see other characteristics such as dead trees that are still standing, that were broken up high. Or just large logs laying down on the ground, like over there, what you call coarse woody debris.
In one particularly fertile, bowl-shaped area, there’s a stand of lofty old ash, shading a brook under the canopy.
A few hundred feet off the trail, a dead American chestnut - a species nearly extinct since the early 20th century, leans as is has for decades against a huge hemlock.
A group of researchers – from AVEO, Keene State, Antioch University New England, and other organizations – wants to find every one of these special places in Pisgah , catalog it, and study it.
Tom Sintros, from Keene High, says the researchers want to make sure that logging and other disturbances on the edge of this wilderness won’t affect the treasures inside.
29:03 (Sintros 2) I hope that they’ll at this public hearing finally say, listen, let’s all take the time we know we need, there seems to be enough public concern over just having wholesale timber sales, because once they’re cut they’re cut.
Sintros says the study could take as much as 8 years.
State officials said they’re willing to fully cooperate in a park-wide study.
But they see no reason to let it hold up the proposed timber harvest this winter.
For NHPR news, I’m Donna Moxley.
