A WORKING PLAN FOR WESTERN YELLOW PINE 

 LANDS IN CENTRAL COLORADO. 



By p. T. Coolidgi;. 



The Colorado School of Forestry owns a tract of 9,640 acres 

 in the mountains about twenty-five miles northwest of Colorado 

 Springs. This tract is in a wide valley, through which there 

 flows northward a small tributary of the South Platte. The 

 valley is bordered by low hills on either side, the elevations over 

 the entire tract varying only from 7,500 to 8,800 feet. 



The forest consists of a nearly pure (97%) stand of Western 

 Yellow Pine. The remaining 3% is Douglas Fir. The trees are 

 not large for Colorado, but the stand is unusually dense, and re- 

 production is abundant in most openings and especially on the 

 north exposures where Douglas Fir occurs. This type of West- 

 ern Yellow Pine forest occurs in extensive areas in this portion 

 of Colorado, in the Black Hills, and elsewhere, and is due to a 

 cool, moist climate. The tract owned by the Colorado School 

 of Forestry — known as the Manitou Park Reserve — has nearly 

 all (92%) been culled lightly and irregularly during the last 

 twenty or thirty years for the best saw trees and for ties. The 

 resulting forest, therefore, consists of a large proportion of timber 

 just approaching maturity, a small proportion only of overmature 

 stands, and an abundant scattering of old trees of quality too poor 

 to interest the earlier lumbermen. 



In the spring of 1910, students prepared a working plan. In 

 brief, it was found that of the 9,640 acres, 6,640 acres were tim- 

 bered, the remainder being open agricultural or grazing land. 

 The total stand was estimated to be 10,060,000 feet board mea- 

 sure, — a rather uniform stand of about 1,500 feet per acre. The 

 rate of growth per acre was obtained by the usual empirical 

 yield table method — multiplying the number of trees of each 

 diameter class by their rate of volume (in board feet) increment 

 as shown in the following tables, based on 210 dominant trees, ex- 

 cept that figures for heights for the several diameters breast high 

 were obtained from 424 trees. 



