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Search for Virginia pine uncovers forest's secrets
Sunday, August 06, 2000 By Don Hopey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
As state Game Commission officer Gary Fujak's big 4-by-4 bounced down the rutted, overgrown hill on what was once an old logging road in Game Land 203 in Franklin Park, he said, "We are going to find it."
The "it" he was referring to was a 92-foot-tall spike of a Virginia pine listed as the champion for that species in the 1993 edition of "Big Trees of Pennsylvania."
The Virginia pine was one of two state champions from Allegheny County named in the book, while the other, an American elm known as the "Lone Sentinel" in Bellevue's Bayne Park, was cut down in 1998 because it was dying.
For more than a week, we had been trying to find someone who knew where the tree -- discovered in 1979 and last measured in 1990 -- was located. Fujak finally got the directions from a Game Commission forester who knew the tree.
"Once we hike down to the bottom of this hill," he said, parking the truck, "the tree is supposed to be about 450 yards down along a small stream, then across the stream on the left about 100 feet up the hill."
We got down to the jump-across stream on what was left of the logging road. But once we started bushwhacking along the stream over fallen logs and through dense thickets of jaggered, entangled roseaflora, raspberry and wild grapevine, the yardage came harder than for Steelers running against a stacked goal-line defense last year.
Eventually, we ripped legs, arms and clothing free of the prickly brush, pulled thick spider-webs off our faces and out of our hair, and found a deer path to follow through the young woods, which were punctuated here and there by big mature oaks and shagbark hickories. After weaving through the trees, jumping a small feeder stream and crossing a gas pipeline without seeing any evergreens, let alone a Virginia pine, we decided to head back to the truck.
An hour and 15 minutes after we'd left, we arrived at the vehicle hot, thirsty and scratched without ever having sniffed a pine cone. The hot afternoon was building toward a thunderstorm, but Fujak said he didn't want to give up and, if I had the time, we'd set out again after he phoned the forester for better directions.
I weighed the option of walking in the woods against sitting at my desk and communing with my computer screen for, oh, maybe a nanosecond and told him to make the call.
He was told the pine was on the far side of the pipeline. We hadn't gone far enough.
We set out again, this time walking in and along the creek, a faster but considerably wetter route. After 20 minutes of slogging through water and mud, we saw our first evergreen -- a big hemlock. Still, it gave us hope among the hardwoods.
We were moving so fast along the stream that we overshot the pipeline crossing and had to double back to get our bearings. Once we found it, we scrambled out of the stream and up the hill onto a steep "bench" or hump on the hillside.
I pulled out my Audubon Society Field Guide to Trees and read the Virginia pine description aloud: "Short-needled tree with open, broad, irregular crown of long spreading branches. ... Needles: evergreen, 1 1/2 to 3 inches long; 2 in bundle, stout, slightly flattened and twisted; dull green."
For the next 10 minutes we spread out, taking different paths, scanning through the branches of the leafy trees all around us, looking for the needles on a tree that scraped the sky.
When we found them they were brown. And the big pine was down.
It was snapped off in a jagged, toothy break 18 feet from the ground, probably in a wind- storm, maybe due to a lightning strike. It had been down for a while, judging by how the wood, yellow-white when the tree is alive, had turned a dark gray.
"Oh, man, this is sad," Fujak said as we circled the woody skeleton. "It sucks. Mother is down."
We stood around the tall stump for a while just looking at it from different angles. Fujak produced a tape measure. We handed the tape around the trunk, measuring a circumference of 85 inches. Then we walked out on the fallen trunk, running out the tape measure, marking the end and then running it out again and again and again, to get the height. The measurements totaled 75 feet, plus the 18 feet of stump, for a total height of 93 feet. The Audubon guide says Virginia pines can grow to 60 feet tall.
Fujak pulled out a cell phone and called the Game Commission's forestry bureau like a cop reporting a fatal accident.
As raindrops started to fall, I broke off a smooth, barkless chunk of wood from one of the tree's branches and rubbed a wet spot along the grain. We started back through the darkening woods as thunder pealed and the rain fell harder.
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