CHAPTEE XXIII 

 HORACE " COMES BACK" 



WHILE camped on top we spent a few days taking 

 sample acres. The stand of timber, a composite 

 type of pine, spruce and Douglas fir, with fir domi- 

 nant, was so different from that on the sparsely cov- 

 ered eastern slopes that a complete readjustment of 

 our standards for estimating was necessary to meet 

 the new conditions. For whereas the yellow pine 

 that we had cruised through from the Animas to 

 Morgan Creek did not run to over eighty or ninety 

 thousand feet, board measure, in an average forty 

 acres, our sample plots indicated that the stand on 

 top for all species would probably scale from eight 

 to twelve thousand feet an acre three to five hun- 

 dred thousand feet to the forty. 



We found, later, that this computation was not 

 far off. In some spots we struck such an estimate 

 would have been short of the actual timber standing. 

 A number of forties cruised carried all of four hun- 

 dred thousand feet of pine and fir, while for the 

 Black Canyon watershed alone we set our final esti- 

 mate at approximately ninety million feet of stand- 

 ing timber. 



It was necessary also at this time for the baseline 



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