As you drive through the shady, cool ravines along here, take a good look at the tall, dark, feathery evergreens that make these glens so beautiful — the eastern hemlocks. They're the soul of a place like the Dingmans gorge: they shade the streams cold enough for trout, they hold the steep slopes together, and they can live for five hundred years. And they are dying.
The killer is tiny — a sap-sucking insect no bigger than a speck of pepper, called the hemlock woolly adelgid, an invader from Asia that showed up in this park back in the late nineteen-eighties. You can spot its work: little white woolly dots on the undersides of the hemlock twigs, like specks of cotton. Bug by bug, it drains the tree, and over years the hemlock browns and dies. Across these mountains, huge numbers of them are already dead or failing, and the cool green ravines they made are slowly opening up to the sun and changing forever.
Crews are fighting it — treating the finest old trees one at a time — and there's real hope. But it's a reminder as you enjoy these shady glens: a forest is a living thing, and the one you're driving through is in the middle of a quiet, slow-motion battle for its life. Take a good look at the big old hemlocks while they stand. They're worth seeing.
Photo: Nicholas A. Tonelli · CC BY 2.0
