Door to Nature

Can you imagine going to cut your Christmas tree in a forest that has remained virtually untouched for the past 10,000 years? The challenge would be that you’d have to cut your tree using rock climbing gear and ropes!

A pristine forest which has been untouched for the past several thousand years seems unlikely in light of the extensive logging that occurred here from 1850 until well into the early 1900s. Add to that the widespread fires in the central United States in the 1870s, and one begins to wonder how any old-growth forests could possibly have survived.

Trees covering the north bluff of Rock Island.

Drought conditions immediately preceded 1870, and Native Americans moved westward en masse, having been driven from their homelands. The remaining early farmers, in their work to convert wooded areas into pastureland, burned thousands of acres and also greatly degraded large remaining stands of timber.

Every time we visit one of the few really fine old-growth woods in eastern Wisconsin – such as Jung’s Woods west of Shawano, owned and protected by The Nature Conservancy, or the famous Cathedral Pines near Lakewood – I can only wish that all of us could have seen more of the expansive, untouched, pre-settlement forests of the early 1800s.

An Eastern White Cedar tree growing out of the limestone bluff.

Which trees are sufficiently hardy that they could make up the oldest, most intact, most undisturbed forest that appeared much the same to the eyes of the very first Native Americans to settle here as to ours today? A forest that has remained essentially untouched for the past 10,000 years obviously must be highly inaccessible to humans; otherwise they would have wreaked havoc there a long time ago!

Picture yourself standing at the very brink of an escarpment, 150 feet or higher, such as the Ellison Bluff County Park. You drop a stone off the edge and it falls to the very bottom without ever so much as hitting a single object during the entire fall. That’s steep, and it’s an area inaccessible to loggers. But it’s difficult to imagine trees and other plants and animals surviving on such a perpendicular environment.

Even Dr. John Curtis, famous Wisconsin botanist and author of the excellent Vegetation of Wisconsin, wrote in 1958, “A cliff is a geological feature, not a biotic community type.” Professor Douglas W. Larson and his colleagues and graduate students at the University of Guelph in Ontario, have made history during the past 20 years with their remarkable study of the cliff ecology of the Niagara Escarpment. Indeed, they found it to be teeming with life, including various plants, insects, algae, fungi and lichens and also containing the oldest trees east of the Rocky Mountains. Yes, it is an Eastern White Cedar forest, also known as the “vertical forest.”

One can begin at the steep escarpment along the west side of Rock Island State Park, continue down the entire west side of the Door Peninsula into Brown and Outagamie counties, skirt the east side of Lake Winnebago clear down to Fond du Lac and find a multitude of small, stunted, Eastern White Cedars clinging perilously and tenaciously to the vertical stone escarpment wherever it exists.

The oldest trees are generally those having extensive die-back, while the cedars with large crowns are usually much younger. Actually, the very oldest have crowns limited to one living branch. These small, abnormally shaped, stunted specimens aren’t measured as being so many feet tall but rather long.

The downward-twisted and contorted cedars, occasionally reaching 1,500 years in age, are seldom longer than nine feet, are six inches or even less in diameter, and may be growing 1,000 times slower than the normal White Cedar tree we know so well. Some of the carefully studied old cedars were found to be growing outward as little as three-thousandths of one inch annually. You’ll need a high-powered lens, special measuring equipment and a steady hand to count the annual rings of a cross section of one of those ancient “Methuselahs.” The primary factor which limits their growth to such a great extent is that they are growing in rock crevices, not soil, and their roots are extremely hemmed in.

It is common that a cedar tree growing on the face of a cliff can be rooted in several different places, but each root is connected to and supporting just one particular part of the stem or trunk of the tree. Falling rocks can easily kill one or more of the rooted sections which, fortunately, remain in place, thereby continuing to support the living tree. Each time one of the roots of a tree is killed, the portion of the tree it was supporting dies. Often much more of the visible tree will be dead than alive.

What is so truly amazing is what have been found to be cryptoendolythic (cryp-to-en-do-LITH-ik) organisms, including lichens, algae or fungi, appearing as a thin green line and living two to four mm. below the surface of the rock. It is thought that these have evolved to escape the harsh surface environment where there is little to no shade in summer and no snow in winter, and that they possibly help to convert atmospheric nitrogen into a form the “vertical forest” cedars can use as a fertilizer.

Radiocarbon dating of one wave-washed log at the base of the Niagara Escarpment, along the east shore of Door County’s “Sister Peninsula,” the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario, indicated that it was between 2,480 and 2,580 years old. According to Larson, some of the pieces of old cedar wood studied began growing about 3,000 – 4,000 years ago, before Tutankhamen was on the throne. These prized pieces of wood can reveal reliable climate information over many years. Highly sophisticated scientific research is being conducted along the Bruce Peninsula by the University of Guelph.

Professor Larson and his people rank among the world’s most expert and experienced cliff ecologists. They also have been responsible for good preservation of considerable expanses of the ecologically significant and important Niagara Escarpment. Wisconsin and Door County need to greatly increase efforts to more thoroughly understand and preserve this rare, vertical, old-growth Eastern White Cedar forest – before it’s too late!

I have owned a tree increment-coring device for over 45 years and have truly enjoyed a hobby of dendrochronology (den-dro-cro-NOL-o-gee), the study of annual growth rings in tree trunks. For the professional and highly trained dendrochronologists who study the Eastern White Cedars of the vertical forest, growing out of the steep Niagara Escarpment, this is a genuine cliffhanger of a project!