I Went Hiking

I went hiking today in a part of South Carolina where I haven't been in a long time. I logged six hours driving (round trip) and eight hours hiking. I hit a number of waterfalls I wanted to see, but to me the most impressive thing were the forests I hiked through. I had forgotten that this area of Sumter National Forest has some amazing stands of hardwoods.

At first I thought this was a buckeye tree when I spotted it from the trail. But when I got down to the base of the trunk and looked up I could see that it's a Tulip tree.

I stitched this shot from four photos of the tree's trunk. One thing about Tulip trees is their tendency not to taper as much as other hardwoods.

Good Ol' Color

One thing about the Piedmont of North Carolina...we have a wealth of hardwood tree species (both native and introduced) and some years the Fall colors are wonderful. This is an especially good year for color. I took these today on the job. Take a look at what Autumn colors the Charlotte area has to offer right now.

Too busy working on fiction to muck about with travel reports or essays today. Or probably within the next week or two, for that matter.
 

Can't make it to New England...so Charlotte will have to do.

Tenacious Trees

Hiking along a high elevation ridge in Grayson Highlands, I

happened upon these trees when I bushwhacked off trail to photograph some wildflowers. Both of these hardwoods started their lives wedged into solid rock. Unyielding stone was about the only thing remaining in this high country after the logging companies cut all of the forests off. Subsequently, a drought followed, which in turn caused hellish wild fires that burned not only the trash and young trees left by the lumbermen, but also the very soil. After that, flash floods raked the peaks and scoured off anything that could be considered dirt.

That left just rocks as a

substrate for plants to use. This they have done in the more than 100 years since the timber companies left this land in total ruin. To date, the mountains here are still relatively bare of mature forest cover, but there are some groves of trees and vast meadows of grasses, stunted spruce and birch, and shrubs of various types.

Even if they have to live their lives clinging to boulders, the trees find a way to live and thrive.

It may take several hundred more years, but barring renewed attacks on the forest by Mankind, it will eventually recover. This will mean that the high peaks and ridges will once more be cloaked in vast, dark forests of Spruce-fir trees and various northern hardwood types. It will take a very long time indeed to replace the soil and to reestablish the groves that once thrived on some of the highest lands in the Southern Appalachians.

But as you can see, the forests are willing and able.

A red spruce has fallen and taken out a weakened hardwood.

Trees

THEM THAR TREES

When I was a kid I used to go tramping about the woods with my dad. He loved to go hiking, generally in places where there were no trails, and we'd often go exploring.

My dad was very good at tree identification. No, he was extremely good at it. We couldn't pass a tree when he wouldn't know what it was. Sometimes he would ID a tree by just its bark, which is often very difficult. And every time we'd go wandering around, he would point out this or that tree and tell me what it was. And then he'd explain to me how to identify it by its proper name.

And that information would go through one ear and out the other. Why? I'm not sure. I did love the woods, even back then, when I was just a little kid. But for whatever reason, I just never bothered to learn much about the individual trees.

Oh, I could tell you about forest succession, and explain some simple elements of forest hydrology; and I understood the roles some forest types played in certain ecological niches. But I couldn't really tell you how to tell an elm from beech.

Maybe I was having such a good time in the forest that I didn't care for it to be turned into a classroom. Hell, I just don't know. But now that I'm older I wish that I'd paid more attention to my dad when he was trying to teach me how to know what kind of tree I was looking at when I passed it by.

Oh, well. Better late than never, I reckon. This weekend I'll be hanging out with some of the East's best tree experts as we measure some of the world-champion examples of a number of hardwood and evergreen species here in the South. I'll post some photos and commentary when I return.