Posted: Mar 14, 2016 5:18 pm
The_Piper wrote:I'd have to see a citation for that. I live in the Appalachian mountains, and any formerly cleared lands that are unused revert back to forest in a lot less than 200 years. I think it's more like 40 years. Plus it's not like there's a lot of virgin forest left. The majority of it in this region is above 2500 feet, but I suspect the hilltop farming you read about occurred at lower, flatter, less rocky locations. Certainly that's the case here in Maine. There was essentially no farming that high, it would be a losing proposition. (Plus nobody lives up there. )
I live at the base of hills that were cleared and have since grown back into forest.
From what I can recall, it was further south than Maine. Much further south. You're pretty much the start/end point of the Appalachian trail at that point yes?
And I wouldn't want to treat such a vast expanse of land as covered by the Appalachians as homogenous. Obviously land management practises across the mountains would've varied considerably state by state, county by county. All I can say is that at the time Bryson wrote his book, the hilltop meadows I refer to were still in existence and that was in the mid 90s. He mentioned them, partly because he found them delightful, and partly because at that time policy was shifting from preserving those sites as meadows to allowing the forest to regrow there because it was "more natural."