Inside the 350-year-old ‘Elder Grove’ of Paul Smiths

Sep 01, 2023 —

Amy FeiereiselInside the 350-year-old ‘Elder Grove’ of Paul Smiths

Reporter’s Note: Last week, I reported on the largest white pine in the world being recorded in the southern Adirondacks. It’s called ‘Bigfoot’, and it was found in a 550-acre old white pine stand in the Moose River Plains Wild Forest. That’s a four-hour bushwack through dense woods, so instead, I took a trip to another historic stand of eastern white pines in Paul Smiths, called the Elder Grove. 

The Elder Grove is a historic stand of eastern white pines in Paul Smiths. It’s an eight-acre area of about 50 very tall and very old eastern white pines. It’s believed that these pines germinated around 1665, after a natural event, like fire or a windstorm, cleared the area, allowing the white pines to grow quickly and out-compete other trees. 

To get to the Elder Grove, it’s about a mile’s walk from Route 86 in Paul Smiths. You start on an unmarked logging road that winds through meadows and young forest. Then, it turns into a faint herd footpath, which winds through land that belongs to Paul Smiths College. 

Photo: Amy Feiereisel

While the way is locally well known, it’s not a clear path, and I went with two guides from the Forestry Department at Paul Smiths College, professors Randall Swanson and Justin Waskiewicz. 

Swanson has taught at Paul Smiths for 35 years and specializes in arboriculture and urban forestry, but said, “I sure have an interest in old trees!” Waskiewicz specializes in silviculture and takes a small group of students out to the Elder Grove each year, so he led the way through meadows, mud, and under a powerline.

As we traveled away from the road, the sounds of cars faded. Soon, we reached the boundary between the Paul Smiths acreage and state land, which was marked by yellow paint on large trees. 

It was here that Waskiewicz stopped, at a very large white eastern white pine that he explained was not part of the Elder Grove. “It’s obviously a very big tree, three and a half feet in diameter, probably 120 feet tall,” said Waskiewicz. “But it’s fundamentally different than the ones we’re going to see later.”

He says this white pine probably grew up without too much competition and without other pines around. He pointed out the many straight, dead branches sticking out of the trunk, starting just six or seven feet above the ground. The first live branches were up “maybe 30 feet,” said Waskiewicz. “And, you know, it’s enormous, but it’s probably only 120 years old.”

Where we were headed, the white pines are more than twice that old, and Wasciewicz said they’d look different than this youngster. 

Photo: Amy Feiereisel

After a few more minutes we walked over a gentle rise and the forest changed. It was mossier, more lush, and much more open than the previous woods.

We’d reached the Elder Grove. Looking down a subtle slope, there were far fewer small and mid-sized trees. Instead, we saw some of the fifty 350-year-old eastern white pines, both standing and lying dead on the ground. 

Decades ago, the trees were all tagged and numbered with little metal tags. Waskiewicz pulled out a hand-drawn map someone made back in the early 2000s, which showed the position of the trees and their numbers. 

Photo: Amy Feiereisel

Photo: Amy Feiereisel

We headed towards Tree Number 101, which is about three feet wide and over 130 feet tall. While it’s a similar width to the younger white pine we saw earlier, it’s taller, and the trunk is smooth. There are no dead branches to be found.

Waskiewicz said that’s because this tree grew up densely surrounded by other white pines and got lots of side shade. Any branches that were there fell off long ago, with bark growing over where they had been. 

Photo: Amy Feiereisel

“We’re going up at least 80 feet before we see a branch,” said Randall Swanson, as we craned our heads back to look into the overstory. The first branches are so high up that the crown of the tree looked small.

“From the ground that doesn’t look like a huge crown,” said Swanson. “But that has to generate all the food to support all the rest of living tissue in this tree.”

There are about 50 of these ancient eastern white pines in the Elder Grove, and they’re around 350 years old. They’re estimated to have germinated around 1665, after some big event, like a fire or a windstorm, cleared the area.

Eastern white pines love sunlight and are “an inherently giant tree,” said Waskiewicz. “They will get 20, 30, 40 feet taller than any other species that we grow on the same site. Give them sunlight, and they’ll out compete anybody.” 

They grow relatively straight and have long been a prized wood, he said. “It’s a very lightweight, yet strong wood,” said Waskiewicz. “It’s soft, it’s easy to carve. It’s just good for a lot of things.”

Photo: Amy Feiereisel

That’s why historically, the eastern white pine has been heavily logged, and why this stand is special. Somehow, it escaped centuries of logging in the Adirondacks.

“Occasionally you find a tree that looks particularly impressive,” said Swanson. He said finding 50 white pines together that are so old is quite rare. 

Swanson and Waskiewicz say the Elder Grove probably survived because the stand is in a lower, wetter area, which would have been sheltered from storms and been trickier to log for humans. 

“It’s really stunning to think that they’ve been here longer than the country,” said Swanson.

“Imagine standing in the same place for 350 years,” said Wasciewicz. “Imagine all the storms you would have to sit through and all the lightning strikes overhead.”

Many of the trees have lighting strike scars on their trunks. The bark looks almost like plated armor, and it’s a weathered grey color.

Wasciewicz pointed out the upper branches. They look nothing like the straight branches we saw on the 120-year-old tree. 

“I call them bodybuilder arms,” said Wasciewicz, “because they’re all twisted at weird right angles and stuff. Because they’ve been snapped and then re-sprouted off the side…they’ve got this character to them. That reflects 350 years of the slings and arrows that tree life throws at you.”

Photo: Amy Feiereisel

But in 50 years, these pines will probably all be gone. They’re reaching the end of their lifespans, and have started to fall from sheer height, rot, and age.

Swanson calls this the ‘mortality spiral’, which is when “a combination of factors finally weaken a tree or bring it to a point, the tipping point, where it can’t come back from it.”

Waskiewicz says the mortality spiral is true for whole stands; one goes, and then there’s less cover, and then another falls, and another. “We’re kind of here with this stand. It’s not going to be here in 50 years.”

There are already several three-foot or four-foot wide trunks on the ground. You can see where they crashed through the understory. We look at one behemoth trunk that Waskiewicz says fell a few years ago. “You see the spruce on the left has been knocked forever the rest of its life askew. And this maple here has bent over and it’s still pinned underneath the log.”

Ones that fell recently still have their bark. Others are covered in a thick layer of moss and are starting to decompose. That process will take hundreds of years, said Waskiewicz. 

“But in the meantime, you know, we’ve got little seedlings germinating out,” he said, pointing out baby trees sprouting out of moss. “We’ve got all this moss, we’ve got mushrooms. I can’t even begin to estimate how many different species of fungus are living in this.” 

Photo: Amy Feiereisel

The trunks also serve as homes for woodland creatures. “The cracks and crevices provide all kinds of, you know, nice places for small animals to live,” said Wasciewicz. In the coming decades, he says more of the pines will fall, one after another, until they’re all down.

“It’s sad for us [as humans] to see these these giants fall,” said Swanson. “But from a forest ecology standpoint, they’re playing as much of a role laying on the forest floor as they were standing.”

As the eastern white pines come down, Swanson and Waskiewicz say the shade-tolerant trees currently in the understory will take over: sugar maple, red spruce, beech, yellow birch, and balsam fir. It will become a different forest.

Photo: Amy Feiereisel