So There’s This Place… It’s Ancient, and New

There’s this place near Ludlow Falls.  It’s a little over a mile from where we spend our winters.  It’s an easy walk to get there.  It’s been there for millennia in its current incarnation.  Since the retreat of the last ice age at least.  It survived the crushing and gouging caused by the mile high sheet of ice… and came out the other side vibrant and bursting with nutrients.  A natural garden primed for things to grow.  And the growth was riotous.  The end result:  A climax forest of huge Douglas Fir, Western Red Cedar, Hemlock, Spruce, Red Alder, Pacific Yew and others.  The undergrowth was ostentatious and for the most part, impenetrable.

And then… sapiens marched through armed with single blade felling axes. They cut a swath through to the forests inner refuge.  At first they used single blade felling axes. Double bit axes were considered too dangerous to wield in a place where emergency rooms didn’t exist and wouldn’t exist for another 150 years. Imagine… a couple of hardy men, chopping away at the base of a 1500 year old, 250 foot tall Douglas Fir with a 10 foot diameter… using felling axes?  Just keeping the axes sharp would be time consuming.  Toppling your victim would take more than a few days.  Brutal, exhausting days.  The next steps:  Delimbing the fallen giant and then bucking it into manageable lengths to assist extraction and transportation to a mill.  How do you get a chunk of wood, 10 feet in diameter and 15 to 20 feet long out of the woods to a mill?  Well… construct a small gauge train track upon which a small train could travel, Engineer a steam powered device, a steam donkey, to do the heavy pulling of logs and lifting of the bucked logs onto the train.  Tiz rather mind boggling, eh?

Then invent double man pull saws to speed up the work of felling trees.  Later still, invent gas powered chain saws to lessen the physical brutality of the work.  Even with that, it was and still is brutal, dangerous work.  At least the trees now are not as big being second and third growth, and industrial sized forestry machines can fell the smaller trees in seconds.  Progress?

Over the past 100 years or so, the fungi, mosses and plant life have taken all those sapien constructs and churned them into forest duff.  And amongst all that riotous regrowth, sapiens have carved a new hiking trail through that part of the forest.  It has been granted the moniker:   Creek View Loop. And… it is magnificent!

The early weapon of choice: A felling ax… Using such a tool in the early days of logging… it would take several days to fell a large tree. Several more to chop off the branches and many more to buck it into lengths that could be moved from the forest to the mill.

Into the forests we crawl
Where the sights and visions enthrall
We tramp through the mud
Leave deposits of blood
And feel incredibly small

The Creek View Loop trail snakes through what was old growth forest until the late 1800’s. It meanders through the woodlands and ties together old logging roads, an old small gauge train track and a trestle site that have been reclaimed by the denizens of the forest, mostly fungi. If you didn’t know a bit of the logging history of the site you’d never guess, when meandering through the second and third growth trees, that a small gauge train once belched steam and lurched through the area on small precarious tracks. The sapien derived infrastructure is long gone, cannibalized, installed elsewhere, or just discarded. And, as mentioned above, whatever was left behind was happily eaten by the flora.

The trail itself required several years of hard labor to build. It is not the kind of trail that provides access into the woods for the handicapped. It has steepish ups and downs, and travels over large tree roots and muddy seeps. Goretex lined hiking boots are not absolutely necessary, but do help to tame the trail.

Those were the highlights. This is a trail we will be drawn to enjoy again… and again…