A Northwoods Almanac for 11/7-20/2025
Last Hikes Before the Snow
Mary, Callie and I took advantage of the 55° weather we had the last week of October and did a series of hikes, one of which was the 9-mile loop around Clark Lake in the Sylvania Wilderness Area, just north of Land O’ Lakes.
Sylvania still comprises around 15,000 acres of genuine remnant old-growth hemlock-hardwood forest with some ancient white pines scattered here and there. We ran into a friend, a retired forester, who was camping along Clark Lake, and he asked, “Want to see the biggest tree in Sylvania?” Then he pointed, “It’s right over here.”
Well, that’s what’s called a ridiculous rhetorical question – of course, we wanted to see the biggest tree in Sylvania! I always bring a diameter tape whenever we hike in Sylvania, because you just never know what you might stumble across, so after a couple minute hike, I pulled it out and we measured a white pine. It was 55” in diameter, which was the biggest he’d ever seen, while I’ve only ever seen one larger, but by only an inch, and in the Huron Mountains near Lake Superior.
55" dbh white pine in Sylvania
I love seeing these giant pines, likely 350 to 400-years-old – they are truly magnificent. But in the back of my mind I always recall reading of much larger trees that were cut in the cutover logging years of the late 1800s. John Curtis in his seminal 1959 book, Vegetation of Wisconsin, wrote , “Hardwood stands with only 2 or 3 pine trees per acre were highly profitable, since these few trees were likely to be forest giants from 3 to 6 feet or more in diameter . . . Most of the big pines cut in the heyday of the lumbering business were about four hundred years old and stemmed from widespread catastrophes [fires and blowdowns] in the 1400s. The occasional giants of 7 to 10 feet dbh [diameter breast height] reported by the surveyors must have been still older.”
Theodore Karamanski in his book, Deep Woods Frontier: A History of Logging in Northern Michigan, wrote about giant white pines in 1881 in what is now Schoolcraft County, “The pine trees there consistently measured eighteen feet in circumference.” Divide that by pi (3.14) and you get 69” diameters, or 5’9”.
The biggest one in Sylvania, the one we measured, is 4’7”.
Given the difference in the sizes of individual trees, and the near total loss of remnant white pines in Wisconsin (best estimate is just a little over 1,000 acres – less than 2 square miles) – what we see today is far from a facsimile of what was here just 140 years ago. Curtis summarizes this: “Results from modern studies, therefore, cannot give a true picture of the actual magnitude and majesty of a mature pine forest at its optimum, and this should be kept in mind in the interpretation of contemporary findings.”
Nevertheless, to stand next to a true remnant white pine is to take the yellowed pages of history and bring them into the light.
Now, if we only had the moral fiber to try to restore some of that ancient pinery, and there’s no better place in Wisconsin to do that than the sandy soils of the Northern Highland State Forest.
Goldthreads
Under the massive old hemlocks, sugar maples, and yellow birch were clonal colonies of three-leaved goldthread, Coptis trifolia for you Latin lovers. In late May, the delicate flowers grow singly on long stems with 5 to 7, white petal-like sepals arranged in a star. Emerging from the base of the plant, the upright lustrous leaves rise on short stems, each evergreen leaf divided into three, fan-shaped, scalloped leaflets. The leaves look a bit like barren strawberry, but if you are in doubt about its identification, carefully expose the slender brilliant yellow horizontal roots from which the name was derived.
Goldthread rhizomes
Goldthread thrives in cool, moist woods, particularly cedar swamps and bogs, as well as under Eastern hemlocks.
The brilliant yellow, underground wiry rhizomes vegetatively reproduce by sending up shoots, often creating carpets of goldthread in deep woods.
Goldthread was once called “canker-root” because of its use as a remedy for sore and ulcerated mouths. Most herbs were historically used in a host of different ways, but goldthread had an unusually consistent use among various tribes – Mohegans and Montagnais boiled the root and used the solution for a gargle; Penobscots chewed the stems to prevent mouth sores; similar use was made of the root by Menominees, Potawatomis, and Ojibwas.
Historical references also say the root was commonly used for lessening the pain of teething. The root contains the alkaloid berberine which exerts a mild sedative action, explaining its popularity as a pain killer.
Widely used as folk remedy, goldthread roots dried for market in 1908 fetched sixty to seventy cents a pound, which is crazy to think of given the near weightlessness of the wiry roots. I can’t imagine how many thousands of goldthread plants had to be pulled to make a pound.
Lastly, a tea from the golden root was also used as bitter tonic in the spring, undoubtedly due to the belief that anything that tasted this bad must be good for you.
Liverworts!
I have a whole book called Mosses, Liverworts, and Hornworts by Ralph Pope, a book which I’ve opened on occasion and closed quickly because all those plants are complicated and relatively obscure, particularly liverworts and hornworts. I’m a rank amateur on identifying them, which is actually far too generous a title.
Anyhow, I recently hiked a trail near Cornucopia in Bayfield County, the Lost Creek Falls Trail, and at a seep along the waterfall was an odd plant that one of my companions looked at and said was a liverwort, a Conocephalum salebrosum. Say what? That was Greek to me, or rather Latin as was the case, but mumbo jumbo as far as my knowledge went.
Liverwort - Conocephalum salebrosum.- photo by John Bates
I had along a hand lens with a light, so we put our noses practically right on top of the plant with the hand lens held to our eye, and what a beautiful surprise! The plant was made up of tiny polygons, each with a dot in the center, and all connected together like pomegranate seeds (see my photograph).
I’d never identified a liverwort, and being a plant nerd, I was absolutely delighted. Here was a whole family of plants I’ve been walking by and never knew were there.
I love that moment of discovery. It’s humbling, for one, but also thrilling because here was yet another example of the Earth’s diversity, and creativity if you will, and I was finally privy to it.
All of this, of course, led to my wondering just what in the heck are liverworts? Well, first off, they belong to a group of plants called bryophytes, which are small non-vascular, spore-producing plants.
They lack true roots and a vascular system – in animals like us, a vascular system is a network of arteries, veins, and capillaries that transport blood and lymph throughout the body delivering oxygen and nutrients to tissues while removing waste and carbon dioxide.
In plants, a vascular system refers to the xylem and phloem that conduct water, minerals, and sugars. The xylem transports water and dissolved minerals from the roots to the rest of the plant – think about how a sugar maple moves sap through the tree in spring.
The phloem transports sugars produced during photosynthesis from the leaves to where they are needed for growth or storage.
But plants that don’t have a vascular system, like bryophytes, don’t have all that complicated plumbing. They can’t transport water and nutrients, so they have to absorb water and nutrients directly through their surfaces. And they don’t have roots, nor flowers, fruits, or seeds either.
Robin Wall Kimmerer in her marvelous book Gathering Moss writes, “They are the most simple of plants, and in their simplicity, elegant.”
They’re also often called the “amphibians of the plant kingdom” because they require water for sexual reproduction.
Got all that?
It gets really complicated – way too much for this column – but knock yourself out and Google how it all works if you want to be amazed at their life forms.
Last thing. Bryophytes may seem too small to bother with – I mean, who cares? But they’ve survived for more than 400 million years on Earth and comprise around 22,000 species worldwide, particularly in the Arctic where they are the dominant life form. As Kimmerer writes, “They are the evolutionary first step toward a terrestrial existence, a halfway point between algae and higher land plants.” Without them, no trees, no shrubs, no grasses, no us.
Kimmerer exhorts us to pay attention: “At the scale of a moss, walking through a woods as a six-foot human is lot like flying over the country at 32,000 feet. So far above the ground, and on our way to somewhere else, we run the risk of missing an entire realm which lies at our feet. Every day we pass over them without seeing. Mosses and other small beings issue an invitation to dwell for a time right at the limits of ordinary perception. All it requires of us is attentiveness. Look in a certain way and a whole new world can be revealed.”
Record CO2 Levels
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels jumped by a record amount in 2024 to push concentrations to their highest point since measurements began, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported.
Between 2023 and 2024, the global average concentration of CO2 surged by 3.5 parts per million (ppm) to reach 423.9 ppm, the WMO said. This is the largest increase since modern measurements started in 1957 and is well in excess of the 2022 to 2023 increase of 2.3 ppm. The last time Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3 to 5 million years ago.
Celestial Events
Yesterday, 11/6, marked the midway point between autumn equinox and winter solstice.
Look after dusk on 11/10 for brilliant Jupiter (magnitude -2.4) about four degrees below the waning gibbous moon.
The peak North Taurid Meteor Shower occurs in the predawn of 11/12.
The peak Leonid Meteor Shower occurs during the predawn of 11/17.
Thought for the Week
“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” – Jane Goodall, who recently died at age 91 while on lecture tour.
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