2 FOREST OUTINGS 



sighing through the tall pine trees, or live on a water front where the odor 

 of fish is more to be expected than that of honeysuckle. . . . Out there in 

 the forest, along with the land belonging to the rest of the multitude, it is 

 serving a very important purpose indeed. In fact, it is serving a number of 

 purposes." 



The national forests are the people's soil, and the crops are theirs. And 

 it is no less stimulating to think of all this sparsely peopled land, the vast 

 extent and stretch of 176 million acres, as a common heritage, not to be 

 divided, pieced out in bits, but administered for the general benefit and 

 pleasure. 



This is the Forest Service's job, on 161 different national forests, no two 

 alike. If all these forests could be grouped at our eastern coast, north- 

 ward, they would cover all New England, plus all of the Middle Atlantic 

 States, plus all of North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky. 



Actually, our national forests sprawl in scattered stretches from the palms 

 of Puerto Rico to Alaskan spruce-hemlock, and lie within or across the 

 borders of 36 different States, in the Territory of Alaska, and Puerto Rico. 



IMMENSE AND VARIOUS, rich and poor, these sweeping Federal properties 

 range from sea level to elevations exceeding 14,000 feet. They include all 

 kinds of country and all kinds of cover. On some cut-over lands and on 

 desert or'near-desert stretches, charred stumps or grass, cactus or crouching 

 shrubs are the only vegetation. Such country does not look like the general 

 idea of a forest, but it all comes under that sweeping term, and is managed 

 under long-run principles of restoration and use. 



On greater areas the timber is of an infinite variety. The dense, dark 

 fir-hemlock stands of the Pacific Northwest, the uniform open pine of the 

 southeastern coastal plain, the varied, colorful mixed pine, fir, and cedar 

 of the Sierras, the complex hardwoods of the Appalachians, the low chap- 

 arral of the Southwest, the towering redwoods of the California Coast, the 

 juniper and pifion woodland of the Great Basin, the hardwood second 

 growth of the Lake States, the oak-pine forests of the Ozarks all these and 

 other distinctive types of cover come within the scope of the term "forest." 

 So, too, of the open parks within the spruce-lodgepole pine forest of the 



