THURMONT, Md. (AP) - Catoctin Mountain Park Superintendent Rick Slade led the way up a gradually increasing slope toward Thurmont Vista. Towering hardwoods surround the path, but just 145 years ago, the area would have laid barren and stripped of timber to feed the fires of Catoctin Furnace.
He was followed by Thomas Waldensphul, director of Schwarzwald National Park in Germany, where a similar forest was once decimated by human actions. This month, the two parks plan to sign an agreement officially designating them as sister parks.
“We have the similar history, because our forest was also planted like here, but it was different trees,” said Waldensphul, looking around the forest as snowflakes fell down through the missing canopy on Tuesday.
Schwarzwald - which translates to Black Forest - was cut for years for residential fuel, to support glasswork, and to pay war reparations to the French after World War II, said Simone Stubner, a public affairs representative for the park in Germany. In 2014, a portion of the Black Forest was designated a national park and joined a list just 15 other national parks in the country.
While the concept of national parks in Germany is still new, the United States has set aside and conserved some of its most treasured lands for 101 years.
The National Park Service welcomed Waldensphul and Stubner to tour Catoctin Mountain Park this week to exchange management and marketing techniques that the federal agency has refined over the last century. Similar information-sharing missions were completed in Germany in years past, Slade said.
Black Forest is only 4 years old and is still working on creating its identity, Stubner said. The park does not have a welcome sign or trail signs yet, which makes it hard for visitors to find the park.
“They’re trying to figure out how to do things, and we’re at the part of our life span where we know how to do things,” Slade said before the tour.
On the tour, he pointed out wooden signs that had been installed throughout the park’s trail network with corresponding tree markers. Upgrading the park’s trail markers was an important task after people complained about getting lost on the trails for many years, he said.
Where the two parks diverge, however, is their end-goals for the forests.
Catoctin Mountain Park has restored its hardwood forest, but is missing a mix of conifers - or pine trees - that would have naturally grown on the slopes of the mountain. The Black Forest, on the other hand, has an abundance of fast-growing spruce and is trying to restore the population of beech trees that should be in the forest.
Black Forest is also taking more of a hands-off approach to reforestation than Catoctin Mountain Park.
“The nature will create from himself,” Waldensphul said. “It’s not our duty to make nature. (It is) arrogant of humans to create nature, because nature is so great.”
At Catoctin Mountain Park, however, the park rangers are preparing to intervene in an attempt to restore some of the forest’s missing diversity.
Park Ranger Lindsey Donaldson walked the group to a prescribed burn site where the park would soon be burning down a layer of leaf litter on the forest floor to give a seed bank of pine cones a chance to take root. The goal of the burn was to rapidly burn down the leaves to allow more sunlight to hit the ground, but not to let the fire smolder for too long and damage the existing trees.
Waldensphul manages 120 people at Black Forest who research vegetation, bugs, economics, psychology and sociology at the park, and he debated with Donaldson on the edge of the trail whether the topsoil was deep enough to support such a burn. She explained that the under layer of leaves was still damp, which made the next few weeks the prime time to execute the controlled burn.
Information exchanges like this were exactly what Slade said he hoped would occur during the visit.
When the group crested the trail and reached Thurmont Vista, they paused to talk about sprawling agriculture and municipal land in the distance.
Analyzing and quantifying the views from each of the national parks has been a focus of the U.S. national office recently, Slade explained. Waldensphul’s staff has also been measuring the physiological impacts of going into nature and experiencing different views, he said.
“It’s (a) very emotional feeling if you see the landscape and nature,” Waldensphul said.
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Information from: The Frederick (Md.) News-Post, http://www.fredericknewspost.com
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