Green Gold in the Black Hills

These "Black Hills"' are in Washington State. Back in 1899 the Mason County Logging Company began to yard big logs in from the virgin Douglas fir forest and dump them into tideu'ater for Puget Sound sawmills. Then mills rvere built in the area. By i933 the state bought 85,000 acres of the Black Hills cutovers and formed them into the Capitol State Forest and Nursery. Some of the acres, where fire had hit hard in the u'ake of the loggers, \\rere rbtained for as little as 50 cents per acre. In 1941 commercial operations rvere temporarily closed.

Other ownerships n'ithin the Capitol State Forest bring the total area up to 120,000 acres. Within tu'o years, lvhen the planting progralx is to be completed, the Capitol State Forest will be classified as "completely restocked," according to Assistant State Forester L. T. Webster, field manager of the forest and nursery.

"That is, if fire is kept out," \Vebster said. "Reforestation u.ould have come along naturally right after logging stote cnd school lorest lcnds. from the first but for mistaken efforts to turn the Black Hills into bean-growing and graz\ng land. At one time 4O Sn'iss families rvere located at the site of the present nurserv. Lir.estock gro'w'ers lost their shirts trying to run cattle on the cutovers. A11 of the settlers tried to burn back the young tree grorvth, as a matter of course. Finally the new trees cros'ded them out."

Uncler \\rebster and Bernard Orell. State Forester since 1948, the 85,000 acres of the Capitol State Forest have been rnanaged as a vast field laboratorv for experiment and s:tudf in modern manag'ement of commercial forest land in the Douglas fir region. Comparison of a 1952 photograph of the forest nursery site u'ith a 1937 view of the same scene sho'u,s a startling increase in height and density of voung Douglas fir grou,th. The tou'ering new forest is shading out borders of the nurserv itself. It all means more timber from the \\rest Coast !