We were up near Islip Saddle and spotted a stack of cut-down trees from the Bobcat fire. One caught my eye as especially big, and old. I made an attempt to count the rings and I stopped at 80 rings out from the center. From there, probably a third of the radius of the tree remained to be counted. From there on out the rings were so small I would have been there quite a while and would have needed a magnifying glass. I'd estimate at least another 50 rings. What was striking was that the size of the rings pretty accurately reflected what we know about climate change that started around the industrial revolution. The older rings were 2-3 times the size of the rings of the last 50-years or so. It wasn't clear how many trees were represented in the pile there, but the pattern was similar in each length of timber. I suppose they could have grown in a clearing caused by a fire, but I'm going with the rainfall correlation.
Probably the most neat thing was that, after being cut, one of the trees (these are probably near 3 feet in diameter) fell in a way that the unmolested core of the the tree, from when the tree was roughly 5 years old, protruded from the rest of the log a bit where you could touch it. You gotta wonder what the forest looked like 125 years ago.
