Sierra Club Bulletin 



, and their "spike-tops,"* most of which are due to old age or in- 

 sect attack, show that soon there will be many vacant places in 

 the big family. This must be the case in all communities of 

 trees and people. But the significant thing here is that there are 

 very few youths and almost no children on nearly all of the 

 plateau. And the infirmities of the old folks are likely to in- 

 crease more than proportionately to their advancing age, as the 

 death of neighbors deprives them of the mutual protection so 

 sorely needed in exposed localities. In the forest world, Cha- 

 goopa Town is doomed unless more young trees start in the 

 next half-century. 



Nature is wasteful in Chagoopa Forest. Long searches for 

 seedlings were practically fruitless on most parts of the plateau. 

 Young trees were abundant only in a few places. Yet careful 

 counts in one small grove showed an average of 450,000 lodge- 

 pole-pine seedlings per acre — more than ten per square foot! 

 Nine hundred and ninety-nine of these must die before the 

 thousandth tree can come to maturity, for mere lack of grow- 

 ing space. Thirty-story, densely thronged tenements in one part 

 of town ; thousands of vacant homes with fight and air on other 

 streets ! There are perhaps six thousand acres on the plateau. 

 There are about six acres in this area of closely packed seed- 

 lings. If Nature had spread out on one thousand acres the 

 seedlings she has crowded on one acre, there would be an aver- 

 age of about 450 seedlings per acre over the entire plateau. This 

 would be an admirable basis for the continuance of the com- 

 munity. But Nature rarely does things that way. She has never 

 studied scientific management as man has studied it for the 

 bricklayer. 



Chagoopa Plateau is not an exceptional locality as regards 

 uncertainty for the future. On that wonderful day's trip from 

 Crabtree Meadow to Tyndall Creek we were almost constantly 

 in a war zone. Now and again we were in the first line of 

 trenches itself, where the last tree outposts are struggling to 

 hold timber-line where it is. For a time we were in the uncon- 

 tested territory of the treeless waste, where the forest can never 

 enter unless the climate changes. But on that entire days trip 

 we were never in the undisputed domain of the forest. The 



* "Spike-top" means that the upper portion of the tree-crown is dead. 



