Wednesday's Assignment is Not Easy

If you were like me and you thought that finding northern species of trees in the Glen and around campus would be easy, you're wrong. All three glens are dominated by beach, hemlock, and some maple: few other species of trees are easy to spot. The evergreens planted on the dark side are primarily Norway Spruce, which isn't a native species and is widely cultivated for use as Christmas trees. When I thought about it, I couldn't remember ever noticing a birch tree or a long needled white pine. Since oaks (favorite of the squirrels), hickories, and chestnuts aren't really Adirondack trees, it may be much more difficult to find a cool tree than you might think.

However, running around the glens does reveal something else interesting. As Onno mentioned today in class, there are a variety of different forests and maybe even stages of succession in the three glens (Rodgers, Root, and Kirkland). Unfortunately my picture of Rodgers is a little dark since I spent too much time looking at the trees in Kirkland, but it still gets the point across.

On the left is Kirkland and Root is on the right. Root seems much wetter in general, and supports a variety of shrubby plants, including the giant rhubarb-like plants you can see at the bottom right (if someone knows what they're called please tell me!). Kirkland doesn't support nearly the quantity of shrubs, instead many little trees grow everywhere making the woods denser.

Rodgers is a completely different animal: there is an almost complete lack of any lower story growth. All of the trees are big and even though there is a lot of dead wood on the ground, relatively little grows in it. Running through you almost feel exposed since you can see so far between the trees.

Perhaps these differences are indicative of how the land was once used: from the accumulated garbage, including the famous car in Kirkland and bits and pieces of barbed wire along the edges of many trails, we can infer that once the woods might have once been fields. I think it's interesting that such a wide variety of forests exist on one campus.

Also, the obligatory picture from 46 peaks weekend:

View of the bottom of Lake Champlain from Rocky Peak Ridge