276 FOREST OUTINGS 



adjunct to timber and water and soil conservation; it is in itself conservation 

 designed to preserve and strengthen the American spirit. 



Solvent migrants swarm to the forests instinctively every week end of 

 open weather and, in lesser number, throughout the week. It is as if some- 

 thing in their blood drove them to burn the roads, get out of civilization, 

 and then whirl back to civilization again. "Got no new places to go now, so 

 we just run in circles," growls an old-timer viewing with some distaste a 

 holiday throng in a western forest camp. "I like the woods, though," he 

 adds, "Even with a lot of people squealing in 'em, I like the woods!" 



Research must be pushed; research ranging over the fields of economics, 

 sociology, psychology, aesthetics, botany, ecology, pathology, and forestry; 

 research to the end that the people may use the forests for recreation per- 

 manently without hurting the forests and, ultimately, ourselves. 



The problems are distinctive and challenging not merely in their com- 

 plexity but in their diversity. One need is closer counts or more accurate 

 methods of estimating the number of persons who come to the forests, and 

 the ability — or inability — of certain trees to stand human society. This 

 perplexes research foresters, and they have not as yet learned fully what to 

 do about it. Some of the most decorative trees in dry uplands, particularly, 

 seem to shrink from the tread and touch of man. For instance: 



The aspen, whose groves have always been favored for camping or picnic 

 grounds, is a thin-barked tree and probably for that reason is very sensitive 

 to heat injury. Aspen trees have frequently been killed by the heat of camp- 

 fires at a distance which would have little or no effect upon individuals of 

 other species hardier in this particular. Other tree species, some of great 

 beauty, are sensitive to overuse of their immediate environment because their 

 feeding roots are very close to the surface of the ground. The long-continued 

 compacting of the soil about such trees, preventing the normal develop- 

 ment of the feeding rootlets, affecting the normal aeration of the soil, and 

 probably disturbing the delicate relations between the myriads of soil micro- 

 organisms, will slowly load the scales against the efforts of the trees to main- 

 tain themselves in the never-ceasing struggle with their nearby competitors. 



Meinecke has shown the effect of soil compacting on the redwood groves 



