Pinus Strobus

My favorite touchstone at our family's northern Minnesota cabin is a haggard old white pine that presides over the lakefront. It's been big as far back as I remember, which is pushing 40 years now.

While our state tree is the Norway pine (Pinus resinosa), Eastern white pine (Pinus strobus) was the driving timber species behind Minnesota's lumber rush. Vast pure stands of these magnificent trees once covered large areas of the state. Our cabin is in the Cloquet River watershed, and that area alone yielded 8 billion board feet of pine lumber--that's a one-by-twelve plank over 1.5 million miles long, or roughly six flimsy catwalks to the moon. But only 2% of the original white pine acreage remains, largely because logging practices of the day encouraged devastating fires after an area was clearcut, and the fire killed off all the seedlings.

According to the Minnesota DNR, a section near the Cloquet once produced the largest quantity of timber ever recorded: 33 million board feet from a single square mile. I've always wondered how that could be, given the comparitive hugeness of certain timber species out west. Maybe it had to do with the purity of the stand; maybe they just grew densely on the land and really big and had been spared wind and fire. But if any forest ecologist out there has an explanation, I'd appreciate the insight.

Not that our pines don't themselves get huge. On a canoe trip a few years back I was wandering the Kekakabic trail in the boundary waters with my friend Rolf. Most of the area had been leveled by the Fourth of July storm of 1999. Because this was late May, the open country was lousy with ticks--we each tossed more than 70 into the fire when we got back to camp later that day. But the most impressive thing we saw on our hike was a blowdown victim: a white pine that measured more than five feet across at the stump and Rolf paced off at about 120 feet tall. The ecologist Miron Heinselman created historical fire maps for most of the BWCAW's virgin forest, and revealed that the oldest trees where we hiked that day originated in the late 1600s. White pines over 600 years old and 200 feet tall have been documented, so the great storm may have stopped this one short. If our measurement of that pine was correct, it was bigger than Minnesota's current champion.

Minnesota's White Pine Society works to reverse the dwindling white pine legacy by promoting reestablishment of the species. Several factors still conspire against creating healthy white pine forests: White-tailed deer nip the tops off seedlings in winter, the successor birch/aspen forest crowds out the pines, and blister rust (a fungus imported on seedlings once grown with American seed in Europe) kills or stunts mature trees. The big pine at our cabin successfully fought off blister rust about ten years ago after much of its crown died; it also survived a major windstorm in 2002 that toppled many of the nearby mature pines. With a little luck, the old tree will reign as our shoreline monarch for generations to come.