We struck out from the parking lot, heading into the Green Mountain National Forest (GMNF). Initially, we moved through a predominate hemlock forest heading North. Stopping at a flat spot to get a tree count, my group got 21 hits using the thumb measuring method. Of those 21, there were 2 red oaks while the rest were hemlocks. It seems to be a very homogenous stand.
As we began heading West towards Falls of Lana, I noticed there are many blowdowns to the north of the trail. Here the large hemlocks laid their roots in a thin layer of soil covering large boulders. It is to no surprise that they would blow over in these conditions as the thin soil layer offers little support for the hemlocks. The majority of the blowdowns fell in the South Eastern direction. From Wessel’s chapter on pillows and cradles, we can infer that the trees may have been blown down in a summer thunderstorm microburst or in a winter gale. With the use of a compass, we could have determined the average fall and more accurately inferred the cause of the blowdowns.
Eventually passing the falls we continued to the campsite to sit and observe. Here the trees were more spaces apart and there was little understory, probably due to human intervention. I did, however, notice another blowdown that held a large rock in its lifted roots. The storm must have been very strong.
On the drive back to Middlebury, it struck me how developed that lakeside was. It makes sense giving the beautiful lake and proximity to the GMNF trail system. Yet, the development got me thinking about Johnson and Goatskin’s article chapter on loving our forests to death. The fragmentation and urbanization of areas near National Forests threaten their ecosystem and wildlife. It makes me question whether working forests have less impact on forest ecosystems than fragmentation? Figure 1 shows an Arial image of the Dunmore, Silver Lake, and part of the GMNF. You can see that the area on the Northern side of Lake Dunmore is fairly developed. Also, there is clearly fragmentation encroaching the edges of the GMNF on the Western side of the mountains.
