July 15, 2012 - Cathedral State Park

The start of our trip began at Cathedral State Park, one of only two virgin timber forests in West Virginia.  Back in the early days when timbering was prevalent, someone chose NOT to allow timbering to occur on their land and now we have this small plot of land with timber that has been allowed to naturally grow, prosper and die without the help of human intervention.

One of the first things I noticed as I entered the forest was that a lot of the trees had very few (if any) lower limbs within reach.  I was expecting to be able to reach for a limb and look closely at leaves so that I would be able to identify them more closely but . . . . there were very few close enough to reach (As you can see in the picture below).  This made it more difficult to look at the leaves to determine the type of trees we were looking at.

Another thing that I noticed was how thick the canopy of the forest was.  This may be the reason why the lower limbs were not present . . . no sun to reach them.

The types of trees most abundant in this forest were hemlock.  There were also a lot of maple and oak trees.  The first picture below is of a large hemlock tree.  You can see the massiveness of its base compared to Mr. Colegrove standing to the side.

Here is a large oak tree located near the edge of the forest. Notice the difference of the underbrush at the edge of the forest compared to the picture above with the hemlock.  The amount of sunlight coming to the forest floor at the edge of the forest definitely makes a difference.

We also did testing on the pH of the soil.  We chose 4 different places to test the pH.  We had to dig down about 3 inches through the leaf litter and peat to get to the soil.  The picture below shows the difference between the peat (on the right) and the soil (on the left).

We found that the acidity of the soil fell in a range of 3.5 to 4.5.  Proving that the acidic soil is perfect for the type of trees and shrubs growing here. . . hemlock and rhododendron for example. 

One of the things we've been doing is calculating the board feet that can be found in trees so we picked a large hemlock and did the calculations.  They're shown in the picture below.