This afternoon I headed to the North Tract for my first mountain bike ride of the year, figuring I'd catch a few birds along the way as usual.  I ended up not mountain biking, but dragging my way though a cyclocross course.  

I would say that the trails were literally unpassable, but that would be inaccurate since I somehow passed them, at least up to a point.  I can assert that, without exaggeration, virtually every single jack pine and longleaf pine on the entire reservation has been entirely uprooted by the weight of the winter's snow and thrown to the ground.  I would bike for about thirty feet through the mud and snow (that was the fun part) and then there would be a trio of trees across the path.  I dismounted and fought my way over, under or through them, rode a little further and then, again, blocked.  In a way, it was kind of fun for the first dozen trees, and it was fascinating seeing such total destruction.  What strikes me in retrospect is that not a single deciduous tree came down, not even in domino action.  But if it was evergreen, it's now horizontal.  I've seen tornado damage in forests, and the work of hurricanes, but growing up in New England, the wintertime looked like a traditional Christmas card -- snow around and atop pines and fir and spruce, all of which were able to withstand the weight of those snows.  I wonder with a total lack of scientific insight, but a lot of curiosity, what it is about the growth pattern of evergreen trees in regions where there are frequent snows that differs from those here in Maryland?

At any rate, being a stubborn idiot, I kept riding and then dragging my bike, riding, then tree-wacking, doing this, over and over and over again for about five miles until I reached a place past the power lines where there were so many trees downed in a row that it was at last impossible to go on.  At that moment, I realized to my dismay that I was going to have to fight my way *back* through all of the branches and needles and sap and muck in an uphill direction!  That was not fun. 

It is going to be a very, very long time, assuming Pax even has the funding, before all of those pine trees can be sawed up and moved to the sides of the trails.  I can't begin to imagine what a changed environment the spring warblers and summer tanagers will find when they arrive this year, or whether or not they will find anyplace left to nest and raise their young.  I only hope we'll be able to access the place and see it for ourselves.

Laura Appelbaum,

Cloverly, MD