CHAPTER 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 cow- 
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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