Old Growth Forests Do Exist in New Hampshire

listen:

(sound of hawks)
Getting to one of the most accessible old growth forests in New Hampshire involves a two hour hike, deep into the woods…
(sound of hiking)
We set out to visit an old growth site near Stoddard, managed and protected by the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.
Naturalist Dave Anderson says they’ve built no trails to it, they don’t want to encourage human intrusion.
“one of the things about old growth forests is their famously hard to get to and inaccessible, and hence they have been able to remain as old growth and haven’t been exploited as a farm or place that was logged.”

Our hike begins near an old farm, continues through fields of goldenrod, and into woods of young birch, maple and pine trees.
There’s thick undergrowth of deep green ferns.
We pass giant boulders that may have prevented early settlers from logging, and are soon forced to make our own trail.
(Sound of bushwhacking)
Suddenly, the floor of the forest changes --- to brown leaves and rotting downed trees.
There’s more open space, and less sunlight on the forest floor.
Forester Geoff Jones says these are signs that we’ve entered an old-growth area.
“There’s set characteristics that you look for, and one of them is dead and downed wood in the forest, you look for roads and any evidence of human presence, wire fences, stumps, if you don’t have those in an area that’s one indication.”

Then another indication: an enormous American beech tree, more than two feet in diameter, with its first branches more than 30 feet from the ground.
“Look at the smoothness on the bark, you look up, look at the mammoth size of those limbs in the canopy, they look like elephant legs”

A short distance away, a towering sugar maple makes the Beech tree look like a sapling.
The trunk measures more than three and a half feet in diameter.
It’s easily 80 feet high, making it tough to see its canopy.
Jones discovers something disappointing about six feet up the trunk of the giant sugar maple: mushrooms.
“You see this little shelf of indicators, mushrooms that are growing, that’s an indication that there is a defect, some rot, this tree is in the early stages of senescence, it’s on its way out.”

But even in death, Naturalist Dave Anderson says these trees provide an important habitat.
He illustrates by ripping into a nearby rotting log.
“ if you grab on and squeeze you can literally like a sponge, squeeze the water right out of the rotting wood.. (Sound)

Water drips from the torn up pieces of the moss and lichen covered log.
While there’s no species of wildlife dependent specifically on old growth, Anderson says the downed ancient trees create a unique environment.
“This is the places where the little amphibian species and newts and salamanders and insects will live and this is as important as the trees that we tend to think of that are standing and living.”

Anderson says old growth in the state is very diverse, with shade-tolerant trees of mixed species and ages.
While the trees are vastly smaller than the several thousand year old giant Sequoias and Redwoods of California, old growth in New Hampshire can date back to the 1700’s.
Forester Geoff Jones just happened to stumble upon one such tree when crisscrossing this property.
It’s considered to be one of, if not the oldest tree in the state.
“it’s really like being on an easter egg hunt you see one thing that catches your imagination down below and then you look and you find something else that’s bigger and then wow, it’s the big granddaddy of them all, right before your eyes, but you just never saw it before”

Tucked away on the southwest side of a hill, near a cove, stands a yellow birch tree, four feet in diameter and close to 100 feet tall.
The crown stretches 70 feet wide.
“they’re huge the size of those limbs are the size of many trees in a well-managed forest, it just has that gnarly twisted look that says this tree has survived hurricanes, it’s survived fires

And like an old woman wrinkled with age, the bark of the yellow birch no longer has a youthful golden hue, but is craggy.
Jones says the tree might be 300 years old.
“Anybody who works in the woods has a reverence for trees and when you start seeing trees on this scale and this type of setting you’re not looking at dollars and cents, you’re looking at a biological legacy, you’re in awe of it”

Three-thousand acres of old growth exists in New Hampshire, but that’s less than one-tenth of one percent of all forested land.
These ancient trees are like statues of what the forest once looked like and what the Forest Society hopes will look like again.
For NHPR news, I’m Amy Quinton.