In Montana’s northwestern corner, centuries-old trees rise to a late September sky: ancient cedar, giant hemlock, shaggy sharp-needled spruce. Western larch, which can live for 1,000 years, tower above. Early morning’s light, filtered through the multilayered canopies, shimmers green and iridescent as it hits the forest floor, where bright ferns and mushrooms sprout from a carpet of blue lichen and emerald mosses. Mammoth fallen trees are slick with moss, their exposed root balls as big and round as a Volkswagen Beetle. The ground is so spongelike and moist that it squelches underneath my boots. A breeze moves through the overstory more than 150 feet above, and the forest creaks. A raven calls. A distant woodpecker drums its beak into a tree’s thick bark, foraging for beetles and ants. Otherwise this old-growth, primary forest is quiet.
Deep in a remote and rugged region known as the Yaak, this 192-acre expanse I am walking, unceremoniously called Unit 72 by the U.S. Forest Service, offers a rare glimpse of an original arboreal landscape. This is what the forests that cloak the surrounding mountains and valleys looked like before the axe and the chainsaw. For decades much of the region has been stripped of its timber, yet this lush section of old-growth forest appears to have never been logged, and there is no evidence that it has burned.
This stand, and a few others like it remaining in the Yaak, is vital habitat for grizzly bears and other threatened and sensitive species, as well as more common wild creatures and plants. Elk, moose, gray wolves, Canada lynx and the diminutive northern bog lemming (weighing in at a mere ounce) live here. Mayflies rise in clouds from the marshes and streams where otters play. Trumpeter Swans soar above.
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