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BY JORDAN SEEGER

 

A world where people thrive and grow in harmony with others and the outdoors

 

Camp has always been a place where I’ve felt right at home.  The camp community has taught me so many life skills: how to problem solve effectively, how to work with people from the same and different paradigms to my own, how to listen more than I speak… and believe me, I enjoy speaking so that’s a way I have to constantly challenge myself to grow.  And in this community, most of my core memories at Camp have happened out of doors and, because of that, Camp’s updated vision (above) rings truer still.

The fact of that matter is, though, that I’ve now been here long enough to witness change not just in myself and the people who are a part of the Camp community, but in the outdoors too.  Some of that has been programmatic. I remember mud hikes in the summers where we’d go in throngs 100 strong, down to the Ghost Creek basin. We’d trek through the Oak Forest, which always seemed ancient and giant, travelling down from the top of the bluff to the lowlands, and on down to the outlet of Ghost Creek as it joins the Tippecanoe River. We’d dig deep into the side of the creek embankment, pulling out gobs of rich soil and silvery clay. We’d paint ourselves in it and laugh and stomp and roll in the shallows of that murky water. And we’d trek back through that same forest with its monstrous trees and twisted roots, and march up the side of the bluff in what felt like a straight climb to the top, all congratulating each other at the top for conquering an impossibly steep hill.  

That climb seemed steeper and steeper every year, in part because it was.  The thousands of camper and guest feet that went up and down that hill for year round programs were slowly eroding the face of the bluff until one year we noticed that the erosion wasn’t so slow any more. A few more years and the hill would be impassable. So camp staff went through the effort of creating a different way to access the lowlands, one that in the spring takes you down gradually along the side of the bluff and through stands of blooming bluebells and shooting stars. Camp closed off the steep hill and allowed it to regenerate. Grasses, young trees and shrubs, and more wildflowers all popped up and stabilized the soil, slowing down a process which had been sped up by years of travel over those trails all done for the sake of fun and adventure.

 

 

It was a change. I personally didn’t love it at first. The hill had been a part of my experience, and one that the campers and staff I’d known over multiple years both hated and relished all in the same breath. It felt like a staple part of the camp experience was gone. But that first walk I took the next spring through the bluebells, I realized that this change wasn’t all bad, and the more I walked the trail and took in the other new parts of my surroundings, the more I realized how necessary that change had been. How, sometimes, when people interact with nature invasively over and over again we have to do things that are intentional (but seem drastic) to preserve the environment we’re invading.  

People have been invading the Oak bluff that we lovingly call the Oak Forest at Camp for over 100 years. To learn. To explore. To experience. For some, a walk through the Oak forest at Camp has been a shortcut to get from one spot to another. For others, it’s not been about speeding up, but rather slowing down. It’s about taking a moment to walk through the giant trees and feel connected to nature while still being close enough to familiarity as to not be uncomfortable.

In my time as an Outdoor Educator at Camp Tecumseh more than 15 years ago, I remember teaching students about the makeup of our Oak Forest. Predominantly Oak and Hickory at the top, the middle and lower layers were slowly being taken over by sugar maples. In any forest environment, whether it’s an Oak and Hickory forest like ours, a coastal redwood forest in the Pacific northwest, or a mangrove forest along the gulf, there are trees and plant life that are most suited to thrive at different times. When a landscape starts out as a more blank piece of earth, the populations that thrive will be those with traits that help them do so. Oak and Hickory are among these initial and primary lords of their environment. They are suited to growing in space with lots of sunlight and room in the canopy for vertical movement. While they can develop crowns that spread wide and reach out in all directions for sunlight if planted alone in a field, they tend to develop crowns that fill space less aggressively when in a forest setting, letting more light make its way to flowers, shrubs, and grasses on the forest floor. They tend to share the forest well with other large trees such as ash, cherry, and walnut, creating a diverse environment of habitat and food producing trees to support an equally diverse population of animal life.

The way that Oak and Hickory grow is in heavy contrast to how sugar maples grow. Maple trees are shade tolerant, and grow out almost as quickly as they grow up, eating up a lot of the light that’s trying to make its way down the bottom layers of the forest. The leaves they shed break down slowly as well, meaning that they block out the sun even on the ground for younger seedlings of other trees. For this reason maple trees can take over the middle layer of a forest quite quickly, eventually becoming the dominant species in the canopy as well, but much more tightly packed together. As an Outdoor Educator, I remember telling the students that “the maples are coming.” We could look out from Opening Campfire and see all of the young maple trees growing among the giant oak, hickory, ash, cherry, walnut and other established hardwood trees that were already part of the canopy. And we talked about the slow change that the oak forest was undergoing, moving into a stage of secondary dominance where over the course of dozens of years the maple would become not just the dominant species in the forest, but eventually nearly the only species in the forest. 

And change came. The emerald ash borer (an invasive species of insect that specifically targets ash trees) arrived and started to kill off some of the giants of our forest. Then in 2016, Camp was hit with 100+ mph straight line winds that not only damaged the crown of healthy large trees, but sent the dead ash toppling over. When 10,000 pound trees start falling, they can do an incredible amount of collateral damage. And they did. Many of the established oak and hickory that were on the bluff and in the lowlands between Lake and River villages were caught in the collapse of the ash tree population, and toppled over. Across our forested lands, it’s estimated that we lost as many as 1000 mature trees.  

Our giants had fallen. Not all of them, mind you, but enough to make things seem emptier. The emptiness didn’t last long, as the waiting maples seized their moments to take over. The maples spread their branches out into the large gaps left by the giants that had once stood there, shading out what lay beneath. Their trunks grew in size, and they reached higher into the upper layers of the forest. The traditionally open canopy of our Oak forest was quickly closing, and with that we saw the changes in our ground level, where all of our flowers withered each spring soon after the maples leafed out, and fewer grasses and shrubs could grow. And while the deep greens of summer maples and vibrant colors of fall maples have a beauty of their own, more and more of the dots of color that once scattered the forest floor for much of the year have been disappearing. Over the last 9 years since that June night when our giants fell, the maples have truly taken over the forest, and will only continue to do so if nothing is done about it. The wood will still be there. But it won’t be the same. The trees will be tighter together and won’t ever become the giants that I and so many others have been inspired by in our walks through the forest. The spring ephemerals will be the only dots of color on the landscape for a few fleeting weeks each year in an otherwise sea of uniform dark green maple leaves.

Much of what you see is part of our Oak Forest.

For over 100 years, people have been able to learn, explore, and experience a unique and diverse environment on the Oak forest bluff. And we want to try our best to make sure that 100 years from now the same can be said about Camp Tecumseh experiences in the Oak forest, whether it’s walking among the giants or seeing the wildlife that the diverse population of food bearing trees support. 

So, in this decade, we’ve committed to intentionally reinvesting in and restoring the Oak forest space. Our plan to restore our Oak and Hickory forest has been made in partnership with NICHES Land Trust and individual friends of Camp with experience in the fields of conservation and forestry. Starting in 2020 we committed to planting 400 trees a year on camp property, many of which have so far been planted in the Camp Tecumseh Oak Forest. We’ve worked heavily with hosted groups of AmeriCorps NCCC members to remove large populations of invasive honeysuckle, garlic mustard, and autumn olive on the Oak Bluff. And we have plans to introduce a natural component to keeping balance in many forest scapes that hasn’t been present in our Oak forest for a while: fire.

Oak and Hickory are fire adaptive species. They have thick, platey outer bark which protects the layers of the tree that carry nutrients between the roots and the crown. And if the stem that’s above ground does wither from the fire, Oak and Hickory will use energy stored in their roots to develop a new main stem from the healthy or established root system. In contrast, maples have a thin layer of bark. Small maple trees therefore will usually be culled by a fire event. They also do not generally regrow from their roots when the main stem is compromised. In many forest environments, small fires play a key role in the slow process of transitioning forests from one ecosystem to another. In our forest, introducing fire will kill off the youngest maple saplings, leaving more opportunity and nutrients for young Oak and Hickory to thrive. It will also remove a healthy amount of the leaf litter, allowing not just Oak and Hickory saplings to thrive, but also providing greater opportunity for other dormant parts of the flower and shrub communities in the seedbank to develop.

One of the major steps in making this controlled burn effective has been taking place this winter.  Many of the maples had reached a stage of maturity where they would likely survive a small fire event. Additionally, the canopy in many areas still generally has been closed these past few years, diminishing the effectiveness of our planting efforts. A big part of the plan has included the mechanical clearing of the maples that are too large to be affected by fire. Over the past 6 weeks a team of foresters has been working on our grounds to do just that. They’ve felled a large number of mature maple trees over nearly 40 acres of our Oak forest, creating the opportunity for more light to travel into the lower layers of the forest this spring, and increasing the efficacy of past and future plantings. A team of AmeriCorps NCCC members who we plan to host in March and April will help to remove a large chunk of the downed material near roads and trails. And within 12 months we plan to initiate our controlled burn with the help and guidance of NICHES Land Trust. 

 

 

 

And with all this change, the Oak forest will (for a time) look… well, different. For a bit, there will be more space that looks empty. Nature, though, will find harmony. The light that we make now will mean the forest will fill in with different things this spring. The trees that we plant now will grow tall and fill in the void in the middle layers of the understory. And the ecosystem will balance. The maples will still grow, their helicopter seeds brought by the breeze from other parts of our land. But they’ll take over slowly again, in a way that we can watch, teach about, and manage. And with the right care, planning, and process, as people continue to enjoy the Oak forest for the next 100 years of adventures at Camp, we hope they’ll always be able to walk among the giants.

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Have questions about our work in the oak forest? Email Jordan.