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If Our Trees Could Talk

Story by John Andrews

Photos by Paul Schiller

A pair of oak trees known as the Twin Oaks are among the trees chronicled in Paul DeJong’s book on the Sioux Falls urban forest.

“Have you been here before?” asks Paul DeJong as we sit around a small conference table inside Touchmark at All Saints, a senior living community in one of Sioux Falls’ most historic buildings — the former All Saints School. The massive, four-story granite building in the heart of the city was finished in 1884 under the direction of William Hobart Hare, the first Episcopal bishop of South Dakota. The all-girls boarding school was designed to serve the daughters of missionaries who were serving the sparsely populated Dakota prairies.

But that’s not where this conversation is heading.”Some of the most majestic trees in the city are right outside,” DeJong says.”There’s a catalpa and a ginkgo tree on this property that were probably planted in the late 1800s or early 1900s.”

It stands to reason that the trees would be at least as old as the building itself, and of course DeJong would notice them. He worked at Landscape Garden Centers for more than 30 years, first as an employee and then its owner. He’s had a hand in selecting trees for nearly every neighborhood in Sioux Falls, an accomplishment made even more impressive considering the city’s rapid growth.

He seems to know every inch of soil beneath South Dakota’s sprawling metropolis. His quick and encyclopedic knowledge of trees allows him to tell you exactly why an American sycamore would thrive in one neighborhood but not another.

The book publishing team includes (from left) Jeremy Brown, Paul Schiller, Paul DeJong, Heather Kittelson and Mike Cooper.

The urban forest of Sioux Falls became his passion, and now, with help from friends, he’s finishing a book that he hopes will inspire future generations to appreciate the diversity of the city’s arbor culture. If Our Trees Could Talk: Discovering the Urban Forest of Sioux Falls is a 172-page coffee table book, completed in collaboration with the Mary Jo Wegner Arboretum, that traces the development of several historic Sioux Falls neighborhoods and the trees that give them life and character.

The idea for a book has been in the back of DeJong’s mind for at least 10 years, but it’s coming to fruition at perhaps the perfect moment. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease at age 53. He retired from ownership at Landscape Garden Centers in 2018, though he continued to work part-time until 2022. Eventually, he sold his home and moved to Touchmark.

The urgency of such a diagnosis led to the creation of a team to help make the book a reality. Heather Kittelson is the self-described”connector” of the team. She met DeJong in March of 2023, while both served on the board of directors for the Mary Jo Wegner Arboretum, a 155-acre greenspace tucked next to the Big Sioux River just off Highway 42 on the east side of the city. As she learned about DeJong’s health challenges (which included a serious car accident and a bite from a brown recluse spider earlier in life), she was inspired by his drive to persevere.

DeJong was equally impressed by Kittelson’s energy and positive attitude. She subsequently invited him to be a guest on her podcast called”Fortitude,” in which she interviews people who have overcome adversity. DeJong’s is among the most listened-to episodes.

After the podcast, Kittelson asked DeJong if he had any dreams he would like to see fulfilled. The answer was a book about the trees of Sioux Falls.”It really was a dream,” she says.”He just needed someone to help execute it. I love being resourceful and a connector, and I wanted to see Paul’s dream come to fruition.”

The rest of the team quickly formed. They include Mike Cooper, the arboretum’s executive director and a retired city planner for Sioux Falls; Jeremy Brown, the head of Throne Publishing; and well-known regional photographer Paul Schiller. Cooper and DeJong drove many miles around Sioux Falls, identifying neighborhoods and trees, and Schiller captured them throughout the year.

McKennan Park in spring.

DeJong wants the book to be an educational tool and hopes it will direct more attention to the arboretum. It could also be the culmination of a life devoted to the outdoors.

DeJong grew up on a farm between Sheldon and Hospers, Iowa. He got an associate degree in business and marketing from Northwest Iowa Community College and then headed to Sioux Falls, looking for opportunity. He stopped by Lakeland Nursery and noticed they were hiring.”Having grown up on the farm, I had a general knowledge of trees,” DeJong says.”They were taking applications and I needed money fast, so they said I could start working there the next day. I had no idea what I wanted to do, and in a couple weeks’ time I had found my passion working with trees, landscaping and outdoor living areas. You’re enhancing everybody’s opportunity to spend more time outdoors with their families as opposed to sitting in the house.”

He threw himself into the work, getting to know our native and non-native species and talking with both residential and commercial customers about the trees they wanted and the trees they needed — which were not always the same thing. DeJong is a huge advocate for tree diversity, and that can be challenging in South Dakota.”We can beat up on ourselves for not diversifying, but we are a prairie state with a mix of prairie grasses, so we’re limited in what species thrive here,” he says.”Trees weren’t necessarily by God’s hand meant to grow in South Dakota.”

An American larch in McKennan Park.

When settlers first arrived in Dakota, they would have seen a nearly treeless landscape, other than the occasional willow, elm, ash, box elder and the cottonwoods growing in the river valleys.”Cottonwoods are so towering and large, and they’ll grow in wet, boggy areas,” DeJong says.”They could be several miles away and see these stands of cottonwood trees in the distance and know that there was likely water nearby.”

As railroads moved into Dakota, it became easier for those settlers from Europe or bigger eastern cities to order the trees they knew and loved. Maybe that’s how the catalpa and ginkgo trees ended up in DeJong’s new backyard.”Ginkgos are a very slow growing tree, but this one’s probably 80 feet tall,” he says.”They originated in China and are disease and pest resistant. They’re actually prehistoric trees. They’ve got fan-shaped leaves, very distinctive. The catalpa has a large plate sized leaf. It largely remains silent except one week in June when it gets a hydrangea-like flower. That’s its one week of glory for the year.”

One of DeJong’s favorite neighborhoods is McKennan Park, which is filled with historic homes and majestic trees. Among them is a big bur oak planted after World War I to honor the returning soldiers. It’s also home to the largest silver maple in the state and a stand of American larch.”When I was a kid, they quite often planted windbreaks with American larch,” DeJong says.”I didn’t realize what they were at the time. In the winter all the needles were gone, so I thought they were dead. But they come back in the spring and turn a brilliant golden color in the fall. Then in the winter they go dormant again. They’re mysterious or haunted looking trees.”

The American sycamore in McKennan Park is an example of being in the right place.”There are microclimates in Sioux Falls, like McKennan Park and the Cathedral District,” he says.”There’s good soil; it’s not only cold hardiness. You get on the edge of town where the winds are more abrasive, you’ve got about two inches of black dirt and the rest is excavation clay, and you’re more limited in what species you can use. I would never recommend an American sycamore anywhere other than the core area of the city.”

Other trees stand out for different reasons, such as a concolor fir in the Riverview Heights district north of the Veterans Administration hospital.”I would say it’s 100 feet tall. The first time I viewed that tree, a deer and a turkey came running out at the same time. I bet the bottom branches spread 40 to 50 feet across.”

A stately cottonwood at 57th and Minnesota.

A cottonwood tree near Covell Lake is notable because its lowest branch is probably 50 feet off the ground. Another at the corner of 57th Street and Minnesota Avenue has been growing for more than 100 years and towers over other neighborhood trees. Black locusts in the Cathedral District shine in spring, when they blossom with droopy, lilac-colored flowers.

A stand of hackberries along South Cliff Avenue accents a neighborhood that began as a place for the city’s more affluent citizens to build second homes. A blue beech in the Maplewood District is rare for South Dakota.”It has very smooth bark and looks like an elephant’s leg because it flares out at the bottom. The smooth bark prevents insect infestation. If a tree has rough bark, it’s easier for insects to burrow into it, but the blue beech evolved over time. Trees are constantly under evolution. They’re just like human beings; they have to adapt.”

Everyone involved sees the book as a starting point that can lead to continuing education in K-12 classrooms and at the arboretum. DeJong envisions an”urban forest university” that encourages young people to get outdoors and learn about the trees surrounding them — not just because they might be pleasant to look at but because of their benefits for the environment and our health.”I spent a fair amount of time recovering from surgical procedures at the Mayo Clinic. I remember going through the gardens once I was able to get outside. The trees seemed to soothe my physical pain. It is true that trees reduce stress and promote physical and mental healing.”

Working with DeJong on the book has been rewarding for Cooper and Kittelson.”We’re all so busy going through life that we tend to forget how beautiful our surroundings are,” Kittelson says.”Paul has helped me to stop and be present and take in what’s around me.”

May we all slow down and learn to appreciate both the forest and the trees.

Editor’s Note: DeJong’s book is available from the Mary Jo Wegner Arboretum in Sioux Falls. This story is revised from the March/April 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Stopping the Green Glacier

By John Andrews

Cedar tree encroachment is becoming a problem in the Missouri River valley, choking out native species and reducing available forage for cattle.

WE STOOD HIGH ATOP a ridge on Rich and Sara Grim’s ranch in Gregory County. The Missouri River below looked like a wide blue ribbon stretching from horizon to horizon. A gentle northwest breeze made the afternoon’s 91 degrees feel like 75. Cattle stood on a point along the river munching prairie grass, surrounded by the remnants of a thick grove of cedar trees.

“My nemesis,” Sara Grim said as she grabbed the soft branch of a cedar and began picking at its prickly needles.

She’s not the only rancher who’s grown to despise these hardy trees. Landowners along the Missouri River — especially in the four south central counties of Gregory, Charles Mix, Lyman and Brule — have slowly watched valuable pastureland succumb to eastern redcedars, which have fruitfully multiplied for decades, marching steadily north from Texas, through Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska, and now South Dakota. Farmers and ranchers in those southern states have long fought a losing battle against cedars, but many experts see South Dakota as the cedar frontier, the place where maybe the encroachment can finally be stopped. But to do so, landowners are having to get out of their comfort zones and reclaim acres through a force we’ve all been taught to fear — fire.

*****

HOMESTEADERS WHO POPULATED the central Plains in the 1800s were awestruck by the lack of trees. But in ravines and other protected areas stood eastern redcedars. A member of the juniper family, eastern redcedars are native to much of the eastern United States. In poor soil, they may never grow larger than a bush, but under ideal conditions they can reach 30 or 40 feet.

Sara Grim has become a staunch supporter of prescribed burning to control cedar tree encroachment.

They are drought tolerant and among the most important windbreak species on the Plains, qualities that eventually made cedars ideal for planting in shelterbelts. They can also reproduce prolifically, thanks to the birds and other small animals that ingest the tiny blue berries that sprout from a cedar’s branches. Studies have shown that the seeds pass through a bird’s digestive tract in 30 minutes, leading trees to sprout near their parent trees or along fence lines where birds might perch. Years of unchecked reproduction have led to cedar groves with canopies so thick that no vegetation can grow beneath. That decrease in forage worries cattle ranchers.

Sean Kelly, a South Dakota State University Extension Range Management Field Specialist based in Winner, says that every 1 percent increase in tree cover leads to a 1 percent loss in forage production.”It’s just a slow green glacier moving north,” Kelly says.”You see one or two out there in your pasture, and then five years later it’s 15 or 20. Before you know it, you’re trying to catch up and stay ahead of the curve. It’s hard for a rancher to stay in business very long if all they have is cedar forest and no grazing opportunities. And it can really start to snowball. If you’re not adjusting your stocking rates accordingly, it starts to spiral.”

Landowners began to act in 2011 when Doug Feltman asked the Natural Resources Conservation Service to survey his ranch south of Chamberlain to determine the impact of cedar trees. Using a series of five photographs of a north facing slope taken between 1981 and 2011, researchers determined that an area that once supported 10 cows could now barely support three. Feltman’s productive potential had decreased 70 percent due to cedar encroachment.

The NRCS then looked at neighboring Gregory County. Through aerial photography, maps, GPS and field work, researchers confirmed that 30 percent of the county was covered with a heavy to medium encroachment of cedar trees, judging by average trunk diameters.

A survey of 109 Gregory County landowners revealed that 80 percent were concerned about cedar encroachment. It also indicated that they were interested in learning more about prescribed burning.”Fire is the most economical way of controlling cedars, especially if you don’t have thick encroachment yet,” Kelly says.”When it was Native Americans and buffalo out here, natural wildfires kept invasive species like this at bay. Without that element of fire, they’ve been able to take over and keep spreading. That’s why we’re trying to reintroduce prescribed fire.”

Members of the Mid-Missouri River Prescribed Burn Association create a fire line to help keep a burn under control.

After a series of meetings that began in the spring of 2012, the Mid-Missouri River Prescribed Burn Association (MMRPBA) was officially incorporated in 2016. The organization is landowner-driven and governed by a seven-member board, all of whom own land within its four-county coverage area. Integrating guidelines from several government agencies and university experts, the association established a lengthy and detailed protocol that dictates precisely when and how they will initiate a burn.

“It’s a 15-page burn plan,” says Kelly, who also serves as vice president of the MMRPBA.”On a new burn unit, it’s easily a yearlong process.”

Every burn begins with an initial meeting between one or two board members and the landowner, who also must join the association and attend a prescribed burn on another member’s property before receiving burn services on his or her ranch. The group conducts four or five field visits throughout the year to determine the severity of cedar encroachment and identify other factors that will affect a potential burn: Where can they create fire breaks? Is any shearing needed? Are there hazards, such as power lines? Can safe escape routes be planned?

Once those questions are answered, work begins on the ignition plan. They determine how large the crew should be and what equipment will be needed. If possible, they try to incorporate one or two other landowners to utilize natural fire breaks. If a burn is planned all the way to the river, they work with the Department of Game, Fish and Parks and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Then it’s a matter of waiting for the right weather. Kelly says they generally follow the 80-20-20 rule, which calls for temperatures no hotter than 80 degrees, at least 20 percent humidity and wind under 20 miles an hour. Those parameters mean that March, April and May are prime burning months, followed by a few opportunities in the fall.

After years of preparing, perfect weather arrived in April of 2016. The association was ready for its first prescribed burn on the Grim ranch.

*****

SARA GRIM WAS A girl on horseback, helping her father move cattle through the river breaks of the family ranch. When they came to a grove of cedars, she got off and led the horse through. That’s when a cedar branch caught on the saddle horn and broke the latigo.

“Now that’s a memory,” she laughs.”I haven’t thought about that in years. I don’t remember how he dealt with that. We had bad cedar trees back then and the cattle would get in them. It was hard to get them out; we had to crawl or lead the horse through. My father was noticing a problem with cedar trees, but nobody knew what to do. We all hoped it would just go away on its own, but it didn’t.”

An aerial photograph shows the darkened patches of the Grim ranch treated by prescribed burn in May of 2023.

Grim’s grandfather, William Sutton, arrived on this patch of land in 1929. He was working for the Yeoman Mutual Life Insurance Company, which had ended up with the ranch after its original owners, the Jackson brothers (also owners of the vast Mulehead Ranch), went under. Sutton came from Iowa and within a couple years purchased the ranch from the insurance company. His ranch brand became the Y-S, for Yeoman and Sutton.

When Grim’s father Billie Sutton, a popular local politician, died in a farm accident in 1982, Grim and her brother came home to help their mother manage the ranch. Eventually they decided to split it in half. Grim and her husband work about 3,600 acres of rough river break country mostly dedicated to cattle that have slowly seen their grass get choked out by cedars.

About 10 years ago, the Grims began working with David Steffen, a retired NRCS employee living in Burke, on a Conservation Stewardship Program that focused on grassland management. The program included the idea of cedar control through burning.

Grim was still working in the county treasurer’s office, where she spent 27 years.”One day, Dave came into the courthouse and said, ëSara, what are we going to do about this green glacier?'” she recalls. He had brought an overlay showing the cedar encroachment in Gregory County. The Grims had helped develop the county landowner survey along with Steffen and were interested in prescribed burning, so they got involved.

They quickly learned that education is paramount.”I’ve talked to so many people who are just unaware. They look at those trees growing in the river hills, and they think it’s beautiful, but there’s nothing growing underneath. There’s no grass, no feed, and we’re losing ground.”

The association identified a section of the Grim ranch and formulated a burn plan. The Grims participated in a few controlled burns with local fire departments to prepare.”They were small experimental burns, and we were scared out of our minds,” she says.”I didn’t sleep for a week. It was very scary. For years if anyone saw a fire you put it out.”

But when they dropped the match on that April day, the association was in complete control. Flames roared and smoke billowed high into the sky. When it was all over, 340 acres of thick cedar forest had burned. Just as importantly, the blaze sparked confidence in the volunteers who were learning to manage such a destructive force.”You have to respect it, but you don’t have to fear it like you used to,” Grim says.

*****

PETE BAUMAN HAS been helping people get comfortable with fire for nearly 25 years. When he began, the focus was on using fire to help manage land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program. After he started working for SDSU in 2012, his efforts shifted to working with multiple organizations on creating classes where landowners could be introduced to fire.

Cedars produce thousands of berries that are dispersed by birds and other animals.

“There was just this general idea that South Dakotans had a fear of fire,” Bauman says.”But over the years, it became very clear that people didn’t have a fear of fire, they had a disconnect with fire. There was no innate fear. It was more like we forgot how to understand it.”

Bauman says the prairie evolved with three things: fire, grazing and climate. Indigenous people recognized the value of fires and ignited them to stimulate the regrowth of native grasses that would, in turn, attract the great bison herds.”It’s nature’s wonderful reset button,” Bauman says.”Healthy prairies really are not damaged by fire at any time of the year because native plants come back. Fire stimulates native plant growth, it recycles nutrients, it definitely stimulates total production, seed production and seed viability. Pollinator plants thrive post-fire, which then creates insect habitat. They utilize that smorgasbord of nectar that’s been created. When that all functions well, you’ve got the foraging animals. Those benefits just build up the line. It’s when we throw exotic species into the mix that makes the timing of fire so much more important.”

He says the goals of fire today are to control, reduce or eliminate exotic species like brome, bluegrass, Canada thistle and sweet clover.”Now we have to look at fire as a specific tool that has to do with timing, intensity and duration, very much like grazing. We have to apply fire not as a hammer but sometimes as a scalpel and understand what the objective is of each individual fire, and that’s different than it would have been 250 years ago.”

For the past three years, landowners have received hands-on training at fire schools that Bauman has supervised throughout eastern South Dakota. Bauman serves as the”burn boss” while attendees assume other leadership roles that a prescribed burn would require.”The coolest thing about prescribed fire is we’re in control,” he says.”We don’t ever have to drop the match. From the moment we start to the moment we stop, it’s about control, control, control, which makes the fire the tool. The tail doesn’t wag the dog. Our mantra is that we want you to be bored on your fire. If you’re bored, your fire is doing exactly what it should do. We don’t want the amped up, excited chaos associated with fire response. We want clear thinking, well planned, well executed, boring fires.”

However, Bauman says a boring fire isn’t enough for cedar infestations.”What those folks need to do to save their ranches requires a higher level of risk and coordination and fire intensity,” Bauman says.”The schools that we do help lay the foundation for those folks to build their skills, because it’s a different kind of fire. If you have a boring fire trying to kill cedar trees, you’re probably not going to kill many trees.”

*****

WE SPENT TWO HOURS traversing the vast Grim ranch by UTV. The gray skeletons of cedars burned in that first fire in 2016 are finally beginning to fall. Charred trunks and trees that sport splashes of brown amongst the green branches show evidence of the 530-acre burn they held on their West River pasture in May of 2023.

Native plants such as snow-on-the-mountain have begun to re-emerge on patches of land treated by prescribed fire.

“Oh, look at that switchgrass,” Sara Grim said, stopping the side-by-side so we could examine the new shoots already emerging, just three months after their most recent burn. Big bluestem waved in the breeze. The white flowers of snow-on-the-mountain contrasted against the blackened trunks of cedars that will eventually topple over.

That spring burn had been planned for seven years. In the meantime, the MMRPBA has kept busy with other fires. The group burned 688 acres in 2017, 271 acres in 2018 and 314 acres in 2020. Covid, drought and other hiccups put a hold on burning for a few years, but in 2023 they rebounded by burning roughly 6,000 acres. There are 10,940 acres on the books for prescribed burning in 2024.

Grim’s ranch is very near the heart of South Dakota’s cedar encroachment, but Kelly says the spread is evident, especially along the Little White River in Todd and Mellette counties and the Cheyenne and James River valleys. Its leading edge seems to be along Interstate 90, where groups are already experimenting with prescribed burns and working to form burn associations.

Sheldon Fletcher, with the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe’s Environmental Protection Office, has begun holding meetings and oversaw a 30-acre prescribed burn after traveling to watch the MMRPBA in action. Rod Voss, a Rangeland Management Specialist for NRCS based out of Mitchell, has helped with two prescribed burns along the James River.”We’re at a stage here where it would be fairly easy to stop if we can just get our people educated,” Voss says.”A lot of people are recognizing the production impacts, but it’s a hard thing to educate people that a tree can be a bad thing. Out here on the prairie, people like their trees, but a tree in the wrong place is simply a weed.”

That’s something the ranchers of south central South Dakota know all too well. Kelly hopes people in other parts of the state begin to see the benefits of fighting with fire.”It’s not an easy sell, especially in some of these areas where the encroachment is just starting and they’re not really sure if it’s a problem that’s worth spending any time on yet,” he says.”I can understand that, but if you don’t believe me come down and take a look at Gregory County, because this is what you might look like in 40 or 50 years. We’ve got a real opportunity to stop it.”

If they succeed, then South Dakota can be something that Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska could not: the cedar’s final frontier.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Ten Outdoor Adventures in South Dakota

Where do your outdoor skills and experiences rank in the wild woods, waters and prairies of South Dakota? Do you know the lay of the land? Can you find wild mushrooms? Have you ever seen a gray kneebobber, or the holey rocks of Roberts County? Here are 10 popular activities to help you break the cabin fever of a long winter and enjoy the South Dakota outdoors.

1. BEFRIEND THE MONARCH

Monarch butterflies rank among South Dakota’s most interesting creatures. A butterfly typically hatches here in August, and then as autumn arrives it flies 2,500 miles southward to the Oyamel fir forests where it will hibernate through the winter, often in the same trees as its ancestors. When it reawakens and flies north in the spring it lays eggs, which dramatically shortens its lifespan. Soon it dies. The process repeats itself as the butterflies travel northward. Monarchs that arrive in South Dakota around Mother’s Day are the fourth-generation descendants of those that departed the previous fall.

2. PONDER THE HOLEY ROCKS

One of South Dakota’s great and unresolved mysteries is the”holey rocks” of Roberts County. All of northeast South Dakota is rocky, thanks to glaciers that brought the rocks here 10,000-plus years ago. Some of the biggest boulders have holes about as wide as a quarter. A geologic detective documented 57 such stones in the early years of the 21st century, though there are probably many more. They are not limited to Roberts County. Some have also been discovered in Minnesota and other northern states. One theory is that the stone holes were chiseled as guideposts by Viking explorers who traveled here from Hudson Bay in medieval times, although it requires a rewrite of immigration history.

3. HIKE BUFFALO TRAILS

First, let’s be very clear. We are not suggesting that any of our paying readers should ever intentionally walk near a wild buffalo — unless they can run faster than a horse (because a buffalo can). The big brown galoots have been clocked at 40 mph. Still, it’s a fact that some very cool outdoor trails exist on popular buffalo reserves. Samuel G. Ordway Nature Preserve in northern South Dakota has hiking trails and a buffalo herd, but there’s a fence in between. Wind Cave in the southern Black Hills has 30 miles of hiking trails, and you share the terrain with a herd of 400 bison. Badlands National Park has an”open hike” policy, and that goes for humans and the park’s buffalo so it’s up to the former to be smart. They say if the buffalo notices you then you’re too close … and it may be too late.

4. MUSHROOM HUNTING

South Dakota has many edible mushrooms, but the morel is king. Though the season changes throughout the state, morels are usually found from early April to early May. The best habitat is a moist forest floor, especially near rivers, lakes and swamps. Morels, which only grow in the wild, are difficult to find because they blend into spring’s grassy-brown environment. Look for yellow or tan mushrooms with spongy caps but beware of the false”brain” mushroom. It is toxic. True morels have a honeycomb cap and hollow stems, while false morels are solid. Don’t pull a morel from the ground because it is connected by a hypha to other mushrooms that may soon emerge. Just snip or pinch.

5. STARGAZING

South Dakota has less light pollution than most states, so we should all be amateur stargazers. Badlands National Park is the most enchanting place to watch the stars; park officials offer a Night Sky Program on weekend evenings through the summer. However, rural areas across the state — even in more populated East River — are conducive to seeing the Milky Way and other mysteries of the heavens.

6. GROW A TREE

Statistically-speaking, South Dakota is 4 percent forested. The trouble with statistics is that 99 percent of our approximately 601 million trees are in the Black Hills. Much of our prairie country looks like the aftermath of an immensely successful deforestation program. It’s not that South Dakotans aren’t trying. We once visited a West River ranch and saw a spindly elm tree trying to grow from a crack along the concrete foundation of small barn.”Shouldn’t we pull that out before it widens the crack?” asked our writer. The rancher was horrified.”I’d move the barn before I’d kill that tree!” he exclaimed. Want to do something good for South Dakota’s outdoors? Go plant a tree (or at least leave them alone).

7. PASQUE WATCH

South Dakota’s state flower is the prairie pasque, Pulsatilla patens, a tough and dainty flower that blooms briefly at the first sign of spring. Though it grows throughout the state, many South Dakotans have not seen one in the wild because it blooms so briefly and because it survives best in rugged, natural terrain. The best habitat is north-facing slopes, and the ideal time is just as the snow melts in early April. Finding a patch is a visual treat. For a real challenge, try transplanting a pasque to your garden. Its long roots, developed to survive drought, make it nigh impossible. You’ll have better luck harvesting its seeds, though even that is difficult. It is truly a wild flower, a fitting symbol of springtime in South Dakota.

8. SPOT THE DIPPER

Thirty years ago, a Minnesota birdwatcher alerted South Dakota Magazine that while fishing on Little Spearfish Creek he witnessed a slate-colored bird that could walk under water. He said he reported it at the nearest pool hall, where everyone laughed at his story. They called it a gray kneebobber.”Probably huntin’ for mountain oysters,” laughed one of the locals. Our Minnesota reader later discovered that it was the endangered American dipper, and fortunately the aquatic songbird can still be found in Spearfish and Whitewood creeks in the Northern Hills. Have you seen a dipper and been reluctant to tell anyone for fear of ridicule?

9. TRY SPELUNKING

Even though the Black Hills is home to more than 100 known caves, including several of the world’s longest, spelunking hasn’t caught on like downhill skiing, pheasant hunting or even watching paint dry. Something about the fear of crawling on your belly in the dark through tight canyons shared by bats doesn’t resonate with the outdoors crowd. But add the experience to your bucket list. Wind Cave and Jewel Cave are run by the National Park Service and offer fascinating guided tours, as do several private caves. The names of the passages in Jewel Cave suggest what you’re missing: the Promised Land, the Mind Blower, Boondocks, Wildflower Walk and Spooky Hollow.

10. FIND A FAIRBURN AGATE

South Dakota is heaven for rockhounds, and the Fairburn agate is prized. The state’s official gemstone was first hunted in the moon-like Kern agate beds east of Fairburn in Custer County, but it can also be found in Teepee Canyon west of Custer and elsewhere West River. People have even discovered them mixed with landscape rock and fill material taken from pits near the Cheyenne River. Serious rock hunters have spent days and even weeks searching for Fairburns with no luck, so consider yourself fortunate if you spot even one.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the”South Dakota Outdoor Challenge,” which appeared in the March/April 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Tapping Into Something Sweet

By John Andrews

Professors and students at South Dakota State University in Brookings have tapped maple trees in McCrory Gardens since 2013.

We planted an autumn blaze maple tree in our front yard in November of 2017. We wanted to enjoy the fiery red and orange leaves every fall, and fortunately, with our prevalent northwest winds, we have yet to rake a single leaf. It never entered our minds that in a few years, after the trunk adds a few more inches of girth, our colorful tree could be the source of a sweet treat.

Canada produces 80 percent of the world’s maple syrup. In the United States, Vermont leads the way with more than 2 million gallons a year, accounting for roughly half of the nation’s maple syrup output. It’s a springtime ritual most closely associated with our northeastern states and our collegial neighbors to the north, but any northern tier state with a similar climate is a potential source of maple syrup, including South Dakota, where syrup hobbyists could one day create a new commercial industry.

No document identifies the first person to ever drive a tap into a maple tree and turn its oozing sap into a sugary delight, but Native Americans have been doing it for centuries. Oral histories provide several origin stories. One recounts using maple sap instead of water to cook venison for a chief. Another, according to the Michigan Maple Syrup Association, passed through generations of Chippewa and Ottawa. It describes a god who saw that his people were becoming lazy as they drank the pure maple syrup that flowed from the trees, so he cast a spell that turned the syrup into sap that required processing before it could be consumed. Northeastern tribes celebrated the first full moon of the spring as the Sugar Moon. A maple dance was among the celebratory expressions.

Indigenous people shared their methods with Europeans who arrived on the continent in the 17th century. The Algonquins made V-shaped incisions in the trees and then inserted concave bark or reeds to run the sap into clay buckets or tightly woven baskets. The colonists amended the process by using augers to drill tapholes.

Canada and the northeastern United States have dominated the maple syrup industry because of the preponderance of sugar maple trees, but any of the roughly 132 species within the genus Acer can be tapped for syrup, including the silver, red and amur maples scattered among the 25 acres of formal display gardens and 45 acres of arboretum inside McCrory Gardens in Brookings. Every spring since 2013, professors and students at South Dakota State University have tapped the Gardens’ maples to make syrup.

The venture began when Peter Schaefer, a professor of plant science and arboretum curator at McCrory Gardens, got a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture to investigate maple syrup production in silver maples. The annual project is now overseen by Chris Schlenker, McCrory’s horticulture and grounds manager.”The idea was that farmers might have windrows of silver maples that grow pretty well in South Dakota,” Schlenker says.”We wanted to see how those could almost become a cash crop by producing maple syrup from them.”

Nathan Mueller taps maple trees on his property on the edge of Marvin. He uses distilled water jugs to collect sap, which runs for three or four weeks in early spring.

McCrory’s staff identified about 30 mature maples that could be tapped and headed out in late February when the weather turned favorable. The season begins when daytime temperatures stay above freezing and then dip below freezing overnight. That fluctuation tells the tree’s sap to begin flowing.

Sap is the lifeblood of the tree. During winter, trees store starch in their roots. In late winter and early spring, that starch is converted to sugar.”As temperatures rise, the tree is essentially starting to prime itself, getting ready for bud and leaf development,” Schlenker says.”It’s a complicated action when you look at how the sap actually flows. There are these air spaces, or vacuoles. At night, when it freezes, they expand, and during the day when it warms up, they contract. So it’s not really a push of the sap coming up, it’s more the upper parts of the tree pulling it up.”

Size rather than age determines a tree’s readiness for tapping. A trunk between 10 and 14 inches in diameter at 4 feet off the ground can support one tap. A diameter of 18 to 24 inches can take two. Schlenker recommends not exceeding two taps because it can be detrimental to the tree.

Using a cordless drill and a 7/16-inch drill bit, make a hole 1 1/2 to 2 inches deep, angling it slightly upward so gravity will help the sap flow. Supplies that can be purchased at stores like Runnings or Farm Fleet include taps, also called spiles, that are 7/16 of an inch thick, though some spiles are 5/16 of an inch. Make sure any wood shavings or sawdust are removed from the hole before tapping in the spile. Take care not to split the wood around the hole, otherwise sap will simply leak around it.

There are a variety of receptacles available for collecting sap, but after dealing with the elements for nearly a decade, Schlenker and his team have found a favorite.”One thing we have to deal with in South Dakota is the wind,” he says.”We found that the best way was to use a five-gallon bucket with a brick on top of the lid. Then we drill a hole into the side and run tubing from the spile right into the bucket. That helps keeps out any insects that might be starting to emerge in the spring, any debris or rainwater or snow melt. It keeps the sap a lot cleaner for processing.”

Once the sap begins running, a single tap will yield about 10 gallons over the course of the season, which averages between three and four weeks. As the tree begins to bud, the sap will become milky, and it’s time to stop collecting.”That’s when the tree is starting to carry more than just water and sugar in its sap,” Schlenker says.”There are some additional nutrients that makes the flavor a little funky.”

Sap can be stored for about a week before boiling begins. Schlenker recommends boiling outside because it requires between 40 and 45 gallons of sap to produce 1 gallon of syrup. That excess moisture is better left outside or someplace where it can dissipate. McCrory Gardens utilizes an evaporator, but hobbyists could use flat metal pans (to increase the surface area) over an outdoor fire.

Chris Schlender, the horticulture and ground manager at McCrory Gardens, watches sap as it boils in an evaporator. It takes between 40 and 45 gallons of sap to produce a single gallon of syrup.

The average sugar content of raw sap from a sugar maple is 2 percent on the Brix scale, a measure of the number of grams of sucrose found per 100 grams of liquid. (It’s named for German mathematician and engineer Adolf Brix, who helped develop it in the 19th century.) Silver, red, amur and other species of maple fall below that. Maple syrup is achieved when the sap reaches 66 percent sugar content, which happens when it’s heated to about 7 degrees above the boiling point of water. Schlenker and his team do most of the boiling in their evaporator and finish it in a turkey fryer or on a stovetop, closely monitoring the temperature with a candy thermometer until it reaches 219.7 degrees. Then the syrup is heated once more, filtered, bottled and sold in the McCrory Gardens gift shop.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, McCrory Gardens hosted workshops where attendees learned the ins and outs of syrup making. Those educational opportunities have since turned virtual, but there are hobbyists around the state who are tapping their own backyard trees.

Grant County Weed Supervisor Nathan Mueller has family in northern Wisconsin, where sugar shacks dot the landscape.”I go back to visit my mom and sister over there and you get exposed to it, you know?” he says.”I got to help people who were hauling it in with Belgian horses, sitting in the sugar shack. I brought some maple trees back from Wisconsin and just got tapping them for a hobby.”

That was about five years ago. Since then, he’s tapped box elder trees (also known as Manitoba maple) and black walnuts.”You can’t hardly kill a box elder tree so what the heck,” he says.”It turned out to be pretty cool syrup. It has a little more caramel flavor than maple.”

Now he’s hoping to get more people involved. Last summer, he led a group of Grant County 4-Hers in identifying trees to tap this spring.”If we can educate kids and get them out, I think it will be a cool experience,” he says.”They’ll make their own syrup and maybe bring it to the state fair. It gives them a better understanding of tree identification and a cool product at the end.”

With the right equipment and knowledge, maple syrup-making seems accessible to most South Dakotans, but maybe not for a city dweller with just one tree.”There are several different types of maple trees in South Dakota that are big enough to actually tap,” Mueller says.”But whether you want to do it to your prime tree in your front yard, I don’t know. That’s up to you.”

He has a point. For now, perhaps we’ll just watch our tree grow and appreciate it for its sweet beauty.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Hill City’s Trees and Trains

All who love Christmastime and trains should rendezvous in Hill City this holiday season. (Anyone who doesn’t love Christmastime and trains might plan to see a doctor.) The South Dakota State Railroad Museum is fun any season of the year, but the locomotives and train exhibits truly shine during the holidays when Rick Mills and his crew add tinsel, holly and lights. The museum’s annual Trees & Trains exhibit is open December weekends and Christmas Eve day. It’s alongside South Dakota’s 1880 Train, which transforms into the Holiday Express every December. Families make lasting memories on the two-hour journey, steaming through the Black Hills in winter. The 1880 crew has implemented many COVID-19 policies to keep you and your family safe. All aboard! Several of Hill City’s favorite restaurants are open year-round, including the beautifully decorated Alpine Inn, a Black Hills staple, and a new place, Pizzeria Mangiamo, that features artisan wood-fire pizzas — one of South Dakota’s very few new restaurants to open during the pandemic.

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Our Favorite Trees

By John Andrews

The Gurney Elm stands in downtown Yankton near Ben Brunick’s carpentry shop and the old Gurney Seed and Nursery Company. It’s believed D.B. Gurney planted the Siberian elm, a native of central Asia, to prove they could grow in South Dakota’s climate.

When I was a kid, my dad planted four spruce trees in our backyard. As a grade schooler they were as tall as me. But then Dad started running a garden hose from an old cistern behind the house and pumped gallons and gallons of rainwater to spur their growth. They are among the tallest trees on the block today.

For some reason, I didn’t give these trees a second thought as I wrote a story last fall about some of South Dakota’s most famous trees. Instead, I mentioned a tree to which I unintentionally set fire in my youth — a memorable tree, for sure, but only because of one incident that caused some neighborhood excitement. Its poor stump is no longer even there. But those spruce trees endure, and every time I look at them, I think of the care Dad put into making sure they survived.

During the course of writing that story it became clear that I was not alone in my fondness for trees. South Dakotans from border to border have stories about trees past and present that have shaped their lives in some way.

Joni Groeblinghoff told us about one such tree that stands in rural Spink County. Her father, Howard”Bill” Thomas, grew up on the family homestead southwest of Conde. One day, road crews told Bill’s father about plans for a new township road that required the removal of a young cottonwood that the family had begun calling Bill’s Tree. The elder Thomas objected, and the route was altered to save the tree, now a stately landmark that is well over 100 years old as well as a point of pride for both locals and the Thomas family. Occasionally, when Groeblinghoff — who lives in Groton — and her siblings get together, they go to Bill’s Tree.

Geraldine Evans shared her memories of the Bead Tree, a low, sprawling oak that once stood near Hermosa. Evans said she first encountered the tree as a young girl in the 1920s and 1930s. The tree had long ago been used in Indian burials; family history told of one chief who had been elaborately dressed and lain on a board among the oak’s branches when he died. For years thereafter, Evans and other children would search for tiny colorful beads that had fallen from the chief’s clothing into the dirt. The Bead Tree was eventually felled to make way for a road, but 12 little beads are among Evans’ most prized possessions today.

After our story appeared, we heard from readers about even more trees. Jerry Kobriger wrote to us about an old cottonwood on the Vernon and Betty LaBau ranch about 5 miles east of Lemmon called the Pig Tree. In the 1940s, Betty was struggling to keep pigs out of her garden, so she hammered a live cottonwood branch into the ground at an especially vulnerable spot in the fence. The branch took root and grew into what everyone called the Pig Tree. It thrived for more than 60 years until its death, possibly due to herbicide drift, coincidentally just months after Betty passed away in 2003.

If you stop and think for a few moments, chances are you’ll remember a tree that holds special meaning for you. Maybe now it lives only in your memories, but it might even be in your own backyard.

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Black Hills Timber

By Paul Higbee

Alan Aker is a third generation lumberman who manages the forest, cuts the trees and markets niche wood products online.

At Christmas time David and Karen Papcke leave behind baffled friends in southern California. Why, these well-intentioned acquaintances wonder, is this couple in their 70s heading to the Black Hills now, for several months, just as winter starts throwing its hardest punches?

They go because they’re tree farmers. Assuming snow falls, this is the time to burn slash piles. It’s good for the forest’s health and, says David, for his health, too.”Being in the forest is the best thing for me,” he says.”The work is hard but in California I don’t have incentive to be outside and active like I do in the Hills.”

David and Karen Papcke thin and prune trees on their Custer County land to create a sustainable, healthy forest.

Farming implies harvesting, and while there’s more to tree farming than growing lumber, logging is a key part of what happens. Certified tree farms are lands deemed sustainable –thanks to forest friends like David and Karen.

Follow the Black Hills timber industry in the news and you might assume all harvesting stems from Forest Service contracts. Most Black Hills pine is, indeed, cut on federal lands, and there’s perennial public debate about Forest Service policy related to harvest numbers, overall environmental impact, whether forests are sufficiently thinned for fire suppression, and how to address the devastating mountain pine beetle epidemic.

Even without those contemporary matters Forest Service lands would steal the spotlight in most discussions of the Black Hills timber industry. That’s because of the region’s remarkable Forest Service history and its policy impact nationally. Think the issue of national health care gets a rise out of people in 2018? No more so than a proposed national forest reserve program with cutting regulations did across the West in 1891. Later that decade South Dakota’s U.S. Senator, Richard Pettigrew, argued the Black Hills should never be made a reserve because it was such a”sparsely timbered region.” There was some truth to that statement. Unregulated timber harvesting since 1875, when settlers began pouring into the Hills, had denuded entire mountainsides. President Grover Cleveland disregarded Pettigrew’s advice and announced the creation of the Black Hills Forest Reserve, effective in 1897 and with cutting rules enforced in 1898.

Gifford Pinchot, the visionary chief of the federal Bureau of Forestry then, decided the Black Hills region was a good model for developing timber policies for national implementation. In 1899,”Case No. 1″ was Forest Reserve terminology for the very first timber sale on Forest Reserve land. The buyer was Homestake Gold Mine and it obtained the right to harvest trees near Nemo. That was the birth of the modern Black Hills timber industry, and it did indeed set national precedent. Case No. 1 procedures were put into effect everywhere.

As if setting national policy in the Black Hills wasn’t enough, Pinchot found a Paul Bunyan of a man in the Hills who personified early 20th century sustainable forestry ideals. Plenty of people today think of Seth Bullock as an early Deadwood lawman, as portrayed on the HBO Deadwood series. In truth, Bullock was that and much more — entrepreneur, friend to Teddy Roosevelt, rancher, a founder of Belle Fourche and Black Hills Forest Reserve supervisor. If anyone could make logging on federal lands work, Pinchot reasoned, Bullock was the man. Bullock insisted Black Hills forest rangers be rugged westerners, not Washington appointees, and there’s no evidence he ever backed down from anyone — Washington bureaucrats or loggers skirting the rules.

South Dakota’s oldest certified tree farm was started by Korczak Ziolkowski, the visionary artist who began the Crazy Horse carving. Reddish trees surrounding the sculpture are evidence of a beetle infestation.

“Bullock was an important part of Pinchot’s experiment,” says David Wolff, Black Hills State University professor and Bullock biographer.”More than once he went to Washington to talk about timber as a sustainable crop and forests as lands of many uses.”

Bullock developed a national following among foresters, and in Washington officials who listened to his theories were even more impressed by the logging revenue he generated. Some years the Black Hills Forest Reserve made more timber sales than all other Reserves in the nation combined. In 1905, Forest Reserves were moved from the U.S. Department of Interior to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — very much in line with Pinchot and Bullock’s view of timber as a crop. The Forest Reserve’s name was changed to the Forest Service in 1907.

Bullock planted new growth of a tree type native to the Black Hills and central to its timber industry — what he knew as”yellow pine.” Today we call it Ponderosa pine, a species able to survive most fires and indeed thrive because of them. Bullock had no way of knowing how technical advances would eventually bring about far-reaching fire suppression. Decades later his forest stood so overgrown that fires would burn hot and likely kill everything.

“We created conditions where big Ponderosa pines, 600-year-old trees, are at risk,” says Frank Carroll, an independent forest management consultant. There are lots of acres in the Black Hills, he notes, where a thousand or even several thousand trees occupy a single acre. Long ago perhaps 30 to 70 Ponderosa pines stood in that space. Dense forests, beyond fire risk, are prone to disease.

Independent loggers were the key to thinning Black Hills forests in the 20th century. Sometimes they reminded fellow South Dakotans that they weren’t quite as independent as people thought. The region’s biggest buyer of timber sales was Homestake, which consumed vast quantities of pine for everything from underground mine bracing to employee housing. The mine operated its own sawmills and, in 1940, consolidated most of its milling in its new state-of-the-art sawmill at Spearfish. With its mammoth lumber infrastructure Homestake pretty much dictated the going rate for timber sales and could afford to under-bid when competitors turned too competitive. Logging has always been an expensive venture, requiring ever-evolving trucks and other equipment, and there were years when more competitive bidding might have helped everyone’s pocketbook.

Mark Ziokowski, son of the legendary Crazy Horse sculptor, now manages the trees around the monument.

Alan Aker has seen a lot of that Black Hills timber history, accompanying his dad on logging excursions as a boy, and owning his own timber company since 1983. Today Aker can be considered a consummate contemporary lumberman — Aker Woods Company makes possible half a dozen jobs, cuts timber on its own land and Forest Service lands, mills it, and uses it to build log homes and other products.

Aker attests to tremendous changes over the years.”Everything’s a lot more mechanical and there are fewer accidents,” he says.”I’m hearing more Spanish spoken in the forest.”

When Aker started his business there were about a dozen big sawmills in the Hills. Now there are three major ones at Hill City, Spearfish and Hulett, Wyoming — and a handful of smaller mills, which, in some cases, have developed specialized byproducts. Homestake is gone but that doesn’t mean independent loggers gained autonomy in arranging federal timber sales contracts. In today’s industry the mills deal with the Forest Service and then contract with loggers.

As the decline in big mills reflect, there’s less logging in the Hills than there was 30 years ago. Still, compared to some other regions — sections of the Pacific Northwest, for example — the industry is holding its own in the Black Hills. Logging trucks rumbling into Hill City and Spearfish are tangible reminders of a way of life that continues despite reduced demand for building materials in a sluggish economy, and despite a series of environmental lawsuits that slowed Forest Service sales. The lawsuits, however, spurred interest in timber coming off private tree farms.

Another challenge is the mountain pine beetle plague, an old disease that Seth Bullock recognized, but now attacking the Black Hills and Rockies as never before. In a single year, Black Hills residents watch entire hillsides turn from green to rusty-red. Once trees are infected the lumber can be salvaged within a few months. Then it deteriorates into worthless debris and is a frightful forest fire fuel.”I look at what’s happening and think we’ll probably see a lot of cutting the next five years,” says Aker.”But then what?”

Not that South Dakotans are surrendering to the beetle without a fight. Aker is impressed by the arrangement Lawrence County struck with the Forest Service to jointly attack the disease. It’s maybe yet another Forest Service precedent set in the Hills that will have national impact.”The Forest Service is committing to very different practices and is to be commended, as are Lawrence County officials,” says Aker.

Lawrence County commissioner Terry Weisenberg gives much credit to Rhonda O’Byrne, Forest Service district ranger for the northern Black Hills.”She really stuck her neck out for us,” he says.”As a result we were able to write a first-of-its-kind contract with the Forest Service, allowing Lawrence County to go to work and fight this tsunami of destruction.” The county hires subcontractors who”cut and chunk” trees the Forest Service knows to be infected, but which haven’t yet launched beetles that will fly and infect more trees. Lawrence County uses mining severance tax revenues for the fight, and has accepted funding from the City of Spearfish and Spearfish Canyon Foundation. The nonprofit foundation accepts tax-deductible contributions from anyone wanting to put dollars into Lawrence County’s battle.

Holes in the bark are evidence of woodpeckers attacking pine beetles.

For South Dakotans who would like to put their own hands to work in keeping forests healthy and productive, there’s always the example of David and Karen Papcke and fellow tree farmers. The Papckes first acquired Black Hills forest land in the 1970s and now own 640 acres in three locations near Custer, Rochford and Moon. They were named South Dakota Tree Farmers of the Year in 1986 and 2006.

“David and Karen are tree farmers extraordinaire,” says David Hettick, state service forester for the southern Black Hills who has greatly enjoyed his association with the couple.”Their property long ago became a certified South Dakota Tree Farm, which in the past was just a recognition of people who go above and beyond what’s necessary to keep a forest healthy. But now certification means a forest is managed in a way that’s sustainable. That brings a better price for timber cut there.”

The Papckes don’t plant trees. They describe their work as mainly keeping the forest thinned, keeping the best trees growing, and recognizing diseased trees and taking them out. Mountain pine beetle isn’t the only disease. Tip moth, says David Papcke, attacks seedlings and results in deformed”junk trees.” The Papckes have fought fires and dealt with the aftermath of winter storms that toppled trees.

When it comes to thinning, the Papckes handle trees with trunks up to 10 inches in diameter themselves. Bigger than that and they contract with commercial loggers.

Not far from the Papcke’s Custer area property is South Dakota’s oldest and biggest certified tree farm. Millions of people have visited, but few recognize it as a tree farm. Not only did sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski begin carving the world’s largest sculpture in 1948, but he also acquired forest property and implemented a management plan below the Crazy Horse sculpture site. Today, son Mark Ziolkowski is the forester, taking care of more than a thousand acres and winning South Dakota Tree Farm of the Year honors in 2007.

Crazy Horse has been aggressive in fighting pine beetles. Mark and a crew of four cut more than 20,000 infected trees in 2011. Additionally, an outside insecticide crew sprays 2,200 trees annually near the visitor complex. Spraying is an expensive annual process that can’t blanket the Hills, but it will save heritage trees and other pines considered significant.

Obviously, as a visitor destination, Crazy Horse Memorial has added incentive for keeping its lands aesthetically appealing. Yet tree farmers in the most remote sections of the Hills say aesthetics matter to them, too.

“The reward for us is to just walk through a healthy forest,” says David Papcke.”Supporting wildlife, thinned, no junk trees.”

We live in a naÔve era nationally when”save a tree” is a euphemism for”be environmentally responsible.” South Dakota tree farmers and others in the Black Hills know that sacrificing trees in proper manner will save a forest.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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After the Blaze

Lightning sparked a fire that blazed across Crow Peak near Spearfish from June 24 into July, burning more than 2,700 acres and temporarily closing its trail. John Mitchell recently explored the popular path, much of it now running through a direct burn area. The forest service urges visitors to stay on the trail due to unstable trees.

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The Old Growth Pines

By Mark Meierhenry

Photography by Stephen Gassman

Our oldest trees are seldom the prettiest specimens in the Black Hills forest. They survive on high granite crags, far from civilization.

Eight centuries of South Dakota news and weather are recorded and preserved in gnarled old Ponderosa pines that grow high in the Black Hills forest. Stories of fires, earth slides, wet periods and severe droughts are stored beneath their bark.

Ponderosa pine is a relatively new species on the Great Plains, only dating back about 11,000 years. But the prolific pines now cover about 1 million of the Black Hills forest’s 1.25 million acres.”No one is sure exactly when the tree took root in the Black Hills,” says Frank Carroll of the Black Hills National Forest Service. Researchers at the University of Wyoming hope to answer that question.

The oldest pines live in granite crags high in the mountains of the central Black Hills, in places not easily reached by people or fire.”Rocky ridges are typically difficult areas for other trees to grow, and offer great defenses from fire and insect predators,” Carroll says.

The forestry term”old growth” generally refers to pines 150 years of age or older. Many such patches exist in the Black Hills, despite more than a century of logging and development. One particular place near Mount Rushmore has trees known to be over 600 years old; another summit by Hill City has trees over 750 years old.

The aged pines are gnarled, knotted and crooked, and often show damage from lightning and wind. They usually survive on barren, rocky environs that hardly seem fit for plant life. Their bark is thick and plated like armor, with big crevices.

The forest floor is a cornucopia of cones, needles, wildflowers and grasses. When the vegetation become stoo dry, it can ignite into fire, the scourge of old growth trees.

Forest Service officials don’t advertise such trees’ exact locations because some people do not respect antiquity. The oldest living thing on earth was killed in 1964 when a student cut down Prometheus, a 4,862-year-old Bristlecone pine in Nevada, for study. Now the oldest is a 4,769-year-old Bristlecone pine known as Methuselah, rooted in the White-Inyo Mountains of California. Methuselah was recording climate conditions on its rings before the written word was developed in Mesopotamia (now Iraq).

Trees tell their stories through their rings, layers of wood cells formed during each growing season. Thin-walled cells formed early in the growing season are called earlywood. Later in the growing season, thicker-walled cells called latewood are produced. The ring is determined from the inside edge of the earlywood to the outside edge of the latewood. The most fruitful growing conditions produce larger cells, and the circumference of the tree expands accordingly.

Tree rings can also be used to date wooden artifacts even after a tree has been cut down. They can determine the age of a long abandoned cabin in the Black Hills, or of a wooden bridge, or old mineshaft. A thousand years from now, scientists will be able to determine when the Missouri River’s concrete dams were built by studying the rings of trees drowned by the rising water.

Scientists can determine when ancient events occurred by tracing the effects of landslides, fires, glaciers and other catastrophes. The mapping of younger trees surrounded by older trees might reveal, for example, that the new growth of young trees filled the rubble of an earth slide.

Ring data is obtained by taking core samples from the pines, causing no harm to the tree. Scientists insert a small hollow rod into the trunk to capture a cross section of the rings. The tube is then withdrawn and the data is preserved and interpreted.

The rings inside ancient trees tell the stories of catastrophic natural events from centuries ago.

Scientists can compare the rings of individual trees to others in a certain geographic area — for example, North Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota — to learn the history of weather patterns that occurred on the Northern Plains before written time.

A particular 762-year-old pine tree near Hill City was the source of a scientific paper by Matthew Bunkers on the history of droughts in the area. Bunkers, a science and operations officer at the National Weather Service’s Rapid City bureau, has written many papers on our local weather.”The most interesting fact from our research is that droughts likely have exceeded the duration and intensity of the 1930s Dust Bowl drought,” Bunkers says.

South Dakota students were once taught that the Great American Desert began at the 100th Meridian, which runs through the small town of Blunt, east of Pierre. Eastern bankers once hesitated to loan money to homesteaders and businesses west of that longitudinal line. Locals scoffed at the notion that the West was a desert, but the bankers had a point. The 1860s brought one of the worst droughts in the history of the Great Plains, and the period of 1859 to 1873 was drier than the infamous Dirty Thirties.

Our driest spell may have been a 20-year drought from 1531 to 1551, when the yet-to-be-mapped Dakotas were twice as dry as they were in the Dirty Thirties. The older dates are less scientifically reliable because of the lack of sufficient older trees to sample.

The driest recent periods, as determined from tree rings, were the 1933 to 1942 drought and a stretch from 1956 to 1961. The converse is also interesting. The period from 1962 to 1969, the wettest in recent memory, is the 10th wettest era. The period from 1882 to 1889, when much of South Dakota’s territorial history occurred, is the sixth wettest. Railroad and town boosters were then advertising Dakota’s lush prairie to people around the world. They didn’t mention the 1860s, especially not to the bankers.

Today many policy-makers, pundits, politicians and scientists are debating causes of climate change and whether our current shift is natural or man-made. We have a responsibility to sort through their arguments, and the oldest trees found in the United States — the Bristlecone pine, and their younger cousin, the Ponderosa pine — have much of the data we need to make informed decisions. We can argue about the weather, but the pine trees know.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2008 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.