Caldwell Preserve is a patch of old-growth forest about seven miles north of downtown Cincinnati and still within the city limits.  It measures about a half-mile by a half-mile and is famous for its many mature beech trees.  The preserve is unfortunately marred by noise and odors from surrounding activities, especially the smell of the Seagram's Distillery. 

 

Don't make any mistake that this preserve is anything like the old-growth sections of the Great Smokey Mountains.  This preserve is nowhere near big enough for various species of plant and animals that live in rotting trees to survive, deer don't come through too often, there are few snakes, etc., and so anything resembling the true biodiversity that once existed here has been gone for 150 years.  Also I don't sense that this particular area is the type of slope and so on most favorable for truly huge trees, although there are about a half dozen enormous trees in the park that are probably pushing 250 years in age.   

 

 

These photos are from 6-6-07 between 9 and 11am.  All the photos were taken with a Nikon D70 and the 17-55 lens.     

 

 

The biggest tree in the preserve, possibly the biggest in Cinicnnati:

 

Here's me standing next to it which hopefully gives some sense of scale.  The scale of the trees in the preserve is typically much larger than in other woods around town.  In fact you can see the difference while scrolling around on Google Maps. 

 

Anyone know what type of tree this is? 

 

 

 

The Mill Creek viewed from trail B. 

 

 

One mark of an old-growth forest is dead mature trees standing like this:

 

The trunk of this beech is huge, much larger than it appears in this photo:

 

Mature beech trees:

 

 

This shot of the golf course on the north side of the preserve illustrates how flat the sunlight was that day, but how much mature forest cover always makes for richer lighting for taking photos.   

 

 

 

 

Nice pics. I didn't know about this place.

Awesome.

very nice

 

    The Mill Creek in Caldwell Park is said to be the only part of the Mill Creek that has not been artificially channelized or straightened.

 

 

Beautiful. I love old, dense, moist woods.

 

On the family farm south of Bluffton, Indiana there's a modest-sized partly-marshy woodlot, maybe 15 acres, that has some old-growth trees in it including some huge beeches. There's a broken-off snag of one of the old ones, about six feet high and hollowed out in the center, where buzzards sometimes nest.

Something is magical about untouched forests.  The combination of filtered light, intense green moss and constantly changing patterns is beautiful.  It is hard to imagine now that so much of Ohio and neighboring states were covered like this.  Your photos are a treat to see.

Great shots, I did not even know the place existed!

Interesting photos and write-up, I had never heard of Caldwell Preserve.

I knew about it because it's less than a mile from where I went to high school but never knew it was of any significance until I was reading this year about old-growth forests in the eastern US and it was mentioned.  It then made sense why there was a park in such an odd place in the city.  I forgot to mention that if anyone visits this preserve, the big trees are almost all on the "B" trail which is furthest from the parking lot and along the Mill Creek.  It only takes about an hour to walk every single trail in the preserve so you'll run into the big trees eventually. 

 

I lived near the Smokey Mountains for four years but didn't even know what an old-growth forest was until I came back on a visit and we went to an old-growth area on the North Carolina side of the park.  There's no comparison down there, there really is an incredible and very obvious difference in every aspect of the forest, not just the big trees.  While trees can still grow very large in Ohio, the big difference is that what happens closer to the ground has been destroyed, even in the old-growth areas I've been to so far.  Environmentalists need to do a lot better job describing precisely why logging old-growth areas is a bad idea because most people are correctly under the impression that the trees simply grow back in 50 years and can be logged again, however the actual character of the forest needs hundreds if not thousands of years to recover. 

 

Hopefully this summer I'll drive to one or two more of these patches of woods around Ohio, especially Dysart Woods in Vinton County which is being threatened by a coal mine a few hundred feet under the old trees.  The company says the trees won't be harmed but of course environmentalists say they will.  There are a number of newspapers around the state that cover the ongoing Dysart saga and so I think I'll be able to sell some photos of the woods to them since none of them ever seem to get a photographer up there. 

 

 

 

These are from maybe the first week of July 2008, I shot a half roll of 120. 

 

 

 

 

Whoops:

 

Have you been to the Sugar Creek Metro Park south of Dayton? There is a trio of three 550-year-old trees (50 years of age when Columbus set foot), although one has since died and the other two are in gradual decline. Well worth the sight to see, although you can no longer get next to them (the boardwalk is now gone).

 

The walk through the summer wildflowers is also very nice, but they are starting to die off for the season.

Great shots, conveying the cool, moist density. Looks like good mosquito habitat, too!