The Youghiogheny Grove — 300-year-old virgin hemlock and white pine, never logged.
Look up — really up — at the trees around you here, because this is the rarest thing in the whole park, rarer even than the falls. This is old-growth forest: virgin timber, never cut, never logged, in a country where almost every forest was cleared at least once. These giant hemlocks and white pines have been standing on this spot for three hundred years and more — some of them were old trees before there was a United States of America.
Walk quietly and feel the difference: the deep shade, the soft floor, the cathedral hush of it, the way the light comes down in shafts through branches a hundred feet up. This is what nearly all of these mountains looked like once, before the saws — a great, dim, mossy, primeval wood. Only a tiny scrap of it survived here, and Boone will tell you how. For now, just walk slow under the giants, and let them make you feel as small and as brief as you truly are. It's good for the soul.
Photo: Treefender K · CC BY 4.0
