Door to Nature: Door County Snowstorms

Snowshoe tracks reveal a quiet journey through an old-growth forest in Door County. Photo by Roy Lukes.

During the winter of 1981-82, we experienced a record amount of snow in Baileys Harbor. The first storm of 1982 was a wet, heavy snow that became frozen and stuck to the trees. More than 60 inches fell in January of 1982 alone, and that had a terrific impact on many trees. 

Evergreen trees growing along the edges of roads, trails and openings are frequently lopsided in their shapes, with the greatest amount of foliage occurring on the sides of the trees facing sunlit areas.

Unfortunately, hundreds of lopsided trees accumulated a lot of snow on the portions of their crowns that were facing the openings and thus were either bent nearly down to the ground or were broken under the tremendous weight of the snow. It took several weeks to clear the hiking trails at The Ridges Sanctuary, where we lived at the time.

The same thing happened this past Dec. 1 with the very wet, heavy, wind-blown snow that coated many trees. My own driveway, lined with mainly deciduous trees, was a mess to clean up. Many trees were leaning over the lane to the point where it took a half hour just to knock the snow from the dozens of smaller, flexible trees.

Going back to January 1982, what a shock my late husband, Roy, and I had when we drove to the Toft Point entrance road. The pathway was totally blocked by hundreds of leaning trees, mostly evergreens, which were weighted to the ground with the snowpack. So many spruces, balsam firs and arborvitaes had been bent downward that it was impossible to even determine where the road was. 

All we could do was to begin cutting and clearing one tree at a time. Eventually, after several days of work on the mile-long road, we were able to make our way out to Mud Bay and the buildings there. Fortunately, several friends helped us with that work.

Through a great deal of hard work, mixed with a bit of sadness about the loss of so many trees resulting from the deep snows that winter, we also realized that the hundreds of new “windows of light” that had been created in the forest canopy would help tremendously in enabling many other plant species to survive and spread. 

Included was the tiny lake iris, Iris lacustris, whose very existence is dependent upon periodic wind storms and heavy snows capable of toppling trees. It is those newly created patches of sunlight where these federally threatened wildflowers manage to increase in number, and where new colonies will grow to replace others that have been shaded out of existence.

The Dec. 1 storm again affected Toft Point, where dozens of trees toppled over the main trail, and we needed a professional tree service to clear the roadway.

Some people think this is a tragedy and that it’s harmful to all the small plants that now lie under the fallen trees, but this is a natural occurrence in a large forest. Thinking back to January 1982, even with that event of downed trees, the Toft Point State Natural Area has regrown and healed itself.

Many new trees have since filled in the spaces where the huge numbers fell 38 years ago. Wildflowers have bloomed in the spots that were again opened to sunlight. About 20 years ago, some research students from UW-Green Bay were studying small creatures that live under the big, fallen, long-dead trees. They discovered a large population of the four-toed salamander that wasn’t even known to live in this part of the state. The undersides of these fallen trees became refugia for these creatures: a safe place to live and breed.

A friend told me recently that decades ago, the U.S. Forest Service did extensive research on which components produced the healthiest, most productive streams. The conclusion was that streams needed large, woody debris in them to aid fish reproduction and create good habitat for salamanders and other semiaquatic creatures.

Humans have destroyed a great amount of native habitat for birds and mammals throughout the world. Let’s take more care to let nature be unmanaged and allow some things to happen that are part of normal environmental events. We can learn a lot by watching the way time heals some of the natural things that we think are hurting the land.