SURVEYS OF FOREST EE>EETES. 13 « 



ville, where sheep had been grazed for twenty- three years. This is the 

 oldest sheep range in Crook Gonnty. In these forest s were frequent 

 areas of young saplings of thoroughly healthy and symmetrical forms 

 which unquestionably had not received the slightest injury from sheep 

 grazing. At the same time along the road were seen frequently the 

 gnarled and stunted pine saplings, which showed clearly what doubtless 

 occurred over wider areas where overgrazing and trampling were simi- 

 larly carried to nn extreme. 



The forest conditions on this Bine Mountain spur might form the text 

 for a long discussion on the eliects of forest grazing, but there is room 

 here for only a brief comment on a phase of the question that^is likely 

 to escape jjopular notice. Under ordinary condition- when an opening 

 is made in a forest by the death and fall of an old tree, and more sun- 

 light comes down to the ground, a dense growth of saplings springs up 

 to fill the opening. These saplings competing with each other for the 

 light, send up straight tall trunks, and the one nr two trees that finally 

 excel the others and fill the opening jjossess tall limbless trunks which 

 make the best of saw logs. If for any reason the seedlings in such an 

 opening are injured so that only a few live and develop into saplings, 

 they grow into limb covered trees valueless for lumber. In the Blue 

 Mountain spur the effect of sheep grazing will be seen in the next gen- 

 eration of timber. On those areas in which for any reason the sheep 

 have not killed the seedlinfrs. a good quality of timber can be cut, while 

 those areas on which most of the seedlings are now being tramped out 

 every year will bear trees but not lumber. 



FOREST FTEES. 



Whatever may be the amount of damage due thus far to overgrazing, 

 the popular mind has associated with the forest grazing of sheep, if not 

 distinctly as an effect, certainly as a necessary accompaniment, a kind 

 of forest damage immeasurably more disastrous up to the present time 

 than overgrazing, and now almost universally recognized as a public 

 calamity, namely, forest fires. Without reference to the truth or fallacy 

 of this popular belief regarding the cause of forest fires in sheep-grazing 

 districts, the subject is one of such far reaching effect on the welfare of 

 a State and the communities of which it is made up that to ascertain 

 the causes of forest fires and to devise means for their prevention are 

 pressing and fundamental necessities. A s already stated, in our inves- 

 tigation the reserve was traversed from the soutliern to the northern 

 end. I am confident that there does not exist in the whole reserve a 

 township of forest land in some part of which forest fires have not 

 occurred, and it was difficult to find even a single square mile in which 

 the evidences of fire, recent or remote, were not present. We contem- 

 plated an estimate of the acreage of burned areas, but this plan, for 

 several reasons, was necessarily abandoned. It is jiossible, therefore, 

 to make only the general, but no less positive, statement that, in addi- 

 tion to areas burned over with comparatively little damage to the com- 

 mercial timber, the reserve contains hundreds of thousands of acres on 

 which the timber has been wholly destroyed by fire. 



Especial attention was paid in our field examination to the subject 

 of forest fires. Whenever jjossible we ascended the highest x)eaks and 

 from them examined the adjacent country for the purpose of ascertain- 

 ing the location of forest fires. In this way we saw about forty fires in 

 various parts of the reserve, some of them large, most of them small. 

 The effect of fires upon difi'erent types of timber has already been 

 described (see page 130). 



