Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
GAIL ONDRESKY, from left, Marsha Fairfield and Gregg Jennings are among those wrapping their arms around an old-growth white pine tree Friday during an ICORE hike near Mercer.
By RICHARD JENKINS
MERCER, Wis. - A group of hikers got a chance to see some of Wisconsin's remaining old-growth timber Friday as the Iron County Outdoor Recreation Enthusiasts organized a hike into a stand of remnant old-growth white pines near Mercer.
Local naturalist John Bates led around 30 snowshoers and hikers to the small stand of timber mixed with other, younger trees off County J, roughly four miles from U.S. 51.
Bates told the Daily Globe the definition of old-growth is complex and varies by species of tree.
"What I'm looking at for an old-growth pine is not having any lower branches. If you have a lot of lower branches that means it was grown in the open, it had full sun and it's probably pretty young - it probably came from after the cut in the 1890s-1900. When everything was cut down, it was maybe a young pine at that point," Bates said. "These pines back here don't have any lower branches, they go up 50 feet or whatever before you start seeing branches; so that says this was a forested stand. They grow much slower in a forested stand.
"All of it put together - the fact it's an island of pines in the middle of an alder swamp - says to me it is likely a remnant pine stand, that these pines are very old."
Many of the hike's participants enjoyed the trip.
Minneapolis resident Mike Staeger, who was visiting friends in the Mercer area, pointed out the group was probably some of the few people each year who have made it back to the stand to see those old trees.
While the only way to find the age of the trees is to core them and count the rings, Bates said they could be anywhere from 150 to 400 years old.
"I'm betting on that upper end because they appear to me to be remnant pines," Bates said. "They don't appear to me to be pines that came from the cutover timeframe."
There's no way of knowing why the trees survived the years of Northwoods logging activity, but several ideas were floated during the hike - including the economics of logging.
The small number of trees, and the difficulty of moving them through the surrounding swamp, may have saved them from the logging crews.
The Board of Commissioners of Public Lands having previously owned the lands may also have had a role, according to Bates.
"What we have left of old-growth, a lot of those stands are original Board of Commissioners of Public Lands because they did not go in and clear-cut as fast as they could, like everybody else did," he said.
