"The country has been entirely cut over for lumber, with the exception of a few small virgin tracts. Most of the land is very badly burned and denuded or covered with a small young growth of hardwoods, with scattered cull hemlocks, or in protected places, a fair understory of young hemlock seedlings. As usual, the burned areas often bear young aspen or fire cherry, either pure or in mixture. Another form of denuded land is that which has been cut over for chemical wood.

Fires are frequent and have been very fierce in the past, when the country was newly lumbered and slash was present in great quantities. Now, over large areas there is little or nothing left to burn; yet fires run through the hardwood stands and do much damage. There is naturally little humus over most of this territory, though the second-growth stands in places where fires have burned for several years have developed thin layers of humus. An exception to this condition is found along the narrow valley bottoms, where there is often a fair belt of frost, culled of it best timber, but containing a mixture of good hemlock and hardwoods. In such situations the humus is quiet good".