Protection sought for Allegheny's old-growth.

There is an extremely rare pocket of a native old-growth forest in Pennsylvania's Allegheny National Forest, where 500-year-old, 40-inch-diameter eastern hemlocks tower 125 feet above the forest floor. The Tionesta Scenic and Research Natural Areas shelters the largest-old growth forest in the eastern U.S. between the Great Smoky Mountains and the Adirondacks and lies within a day's drive of tens of millions of wilderness-starved Americans.

That area just happens to be the homeland of Howard Zahniser, author of the National Wilderness Preservation System Act of 1964, which began to protect 107 million acres of wilderness on federal lands across the country for future generations.

The U.S. Forest Service will be making important decisions on how the Allegheny National Forest (ANF) lands are to be used in the future; as required by law, its resource management plan is examined every 15 years or so. Friends of the Allegheny Wilderness (www.pawild.org) and other groups are promoting a plan that would ask Congress to significantly expand the wilderness area in the national forest.

Although the U.S. has vast wilderness areas, only two-tenths of 1 percent can be found in the 11 eastern states between Maine and Maryland. To rectify this wilderness shortage, Friends of the Allegheny Wilderness (FAW) is working to ensure that increased wilderness protection is a priority of the ANF's stewardship plan.

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Under the plan endorsed by FAW, Tionesta's ancient hemlocks would be protected along with 54,000 acres of the most wild, undeveloped tracts in the forest. As Pennsylvania Rep. John P. Saylor remarked when sponsoring the Wilderness Act in 1956, "We Americans are the people we are largely because we have had the influence of the wilderness in our lives."