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Bumped into an old field biologist at Crater Lake who said the trees were planted in rows on purpose
I was hiking the rim trail last August and this guy in his 70s just walks up and points at a grove of pines. He says look how even the spacing is. I honestly never noticed before. He claimed the US Forest Service planted them in grid patterns back in the 30s to make aerial surveying easier for some kind of logging quota system. Said it was all tied to a depression era work program that nobody talks about now. Has anyone else heard something like that or is this just a local legend?
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kelly_miller805mo ago
Gotta wonder if that old guy was just messing with you or repeating something his grandpa told him. Trees in rows for aerial surveying sounds like a lot of extra work for a job nobody would ever check up on. I've hiked around a few national forests and seen plenty of spots where the spacing looks natural enough, just depends on the soil and the fire history. Unless he had some old map or document to back it up, I'd take it with a grain of salt.
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brookefox5mo ago
What if the old guy was actually describing something from the Depression era, like a Works Progress Administration project? I've read about the CCC planting trees in grids for erosion control and future logging surveys, but they also did it for map making. During the 1930s they used those rows as visual markers for early aerial photography, which was still pretty new. Some of those maps are archived in county historical societies, not in the national forest records people check today. It's not just urban legends, you can find the old aerial photos online and see the rows match up with survey lines from the time.
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