This week, we drop by Flat Five Studio in Salem, Virginia. It had a reputation for recording bluegrass bands, but caught a big break in the early 1990s when the Dave Matthews Band needed a quiet place to record its debut album. We also learn a little about primordial forests, and we visit a small nonprofit company in West Virginia that’s making solar powered light kits for families in war-torn Ukraine.
This week, Inside Appalachia drops by Flat Five Studio in Salem, Virginia. It had a reputation for recording bluegrass bands, but caught a big break in the early 1990s when the Dave Matthews Band needed a quiet place to record its debut album.
We also learn a little about primordial forests. A patch of woods in the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve was recently inducted into the Old Growth Forest Network.
And we visit a small nonprofit company in West Virginia that’s making solar powered light kits for families in war-torn Ukraine.
Tom Ohmsen’s been around music and recording his whole life. He got his first tape recorder when he was just a kid. In college, he recorded bluegrass bands, which led to the start of Flat Five Studio in Salem, Virginia.
In the early 1990s, the studio helped launch the Dave Matthews Band, but now Ohmsen’s looking toward retirement.
Mason Adams visited Flat Five to get its history and hear about its future.
The Burnwood Trail Protected And Preserved
If you ever want perspective on your place in the world, visit one of Appalachia’s old-growth forests. Trees tower overhead and you can get a sense of just how old the world is. Old-growth forests play an important ecological role, too, protecting against erosion and providing a habitat for rare animal and plant species.
The nonprofit Old-Growth Forest Network is dedicated to protecting these old growth forests. Recently, the Burnwood Trail at the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve was brought into the group’s network.
WVPB’s Briana Heaney has this story.
Lights For Ukraine
Russia’s war with Ukraine has dragged on for more than a year and a half. The distant war has faded into the background for some, but not for the head of a West Virginia nonprofit, who wanted to do something for Ukrainian families under constant threat of bombardment.
WVPB’s Assistant News Director Caroline MacGregor visited New Vision Renewable Energy in Philippi, West Virginia where they’re making solar light kits for Ukrainian families that can also be used to charge a cell phone.
Dire Decisions At WVU
Students and community members protest on the downtown Morgantown campus of West Virginia University Aug. 21, 2023.
Credit: Chris Schulz/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Grappling with a $45 million budget shortfall, West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia has recommended cutting 32 of its 338 majors, including all of its world language programs.
WVPB’s Chris Schulz has been covering the story.
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Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by ONA, Valerie June, John Blissard, June Carter Cash and Little Sparrow.
Bill Lynch is our producer. Zander Aloi is our associate producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens.
You can send us an email: InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.
Nestled in the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, there is a patch of forest along the Burnwood Trail that is hundreds of years old. It was recently inducted into the Old Growth Forest Network.
Less than one percent of the forests in West Virginia are considered to be old-growth-forest. Most of the state has been timbered due to large scale commercial logging.
However, nestled in the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, there is a patch of forest along the Burnwood Trail that is hundreds of years old. It was recently inducted into the Old Growth Forest Network.
The trees tell the stories of what once was; what the weather was like, precipitation, what the soil composition was, what kinds of animals lived and died in that area. They can even show how indigenous communities modified the lands around them.
Chance Raso is a Park Ranger and a dendrochronologist, or someone with advanced knowledge of the science or techniques of dating events and environmental change by using the characteristic patterns of annual growth rings in timber and tree trunks.
“Old growth forests are like living museums, because there’s only a few spots of them left remaining here in Appalachia and [They are] a great way to have people come out and see what the original forests looked like,” Rasso said.
The Old Growth Forest is encircled by new forested areas. Rasso points out the characteristic qualities of this newer growth forest before entering the old growth forest. In this forest the trees are lower and the landscape is more verdant. Briana Heaney/WVPB
He said in these ecosystems visitors see larger trees. Their twisting branches reach out wide and high in the canopy. Their gnarled and twisted trunks are not tapered upward like younger trees. It’s usually 10-15 degrees cooler in the shady groves around these trees with specs of piercing light checkering the leafy forest floor.
Doug Manning is a park ranger and a biologist at the national park and says that while the old forest tells a lot about the past, it also clues in the park service about things they could do for a better future for our parks.
“It is really amazing to be able to touch something that we know started growing back in the 1600s,” he said. “But the important part, from my perspective, is having this forest that is connected as a reference for us to be able to better manage our public lands.”
Manning said the landscape around these trees and this forest have changed a lot since these trees were young saplings. New and invasive plants and animals are on the landscape, and other species have gone extinct.
“We have a lot of different pressures facing our forest,” he said.
Manning says these old forests that have stood the test of time are good at handling some of those pressures.
“Those ecosystems tend to be better adapted to preventing certain things like flooding downstream. Forests do a really good job of absorbing water,” Manning said.
Brian Kane works with the Old Growth Forest Network and worked with Rasso and Manning to get this patch of forest inducted into the program.
He said not only do these trees help prevent catastrophic weather events like flooding and landslides but trees absorb carbon from the air, they cool the area around them, and they stabilize the soil and sediment with their deep interconnected root systems.
Glow in the Dark Jack O’ Lantern mushrooms sprout out of a hundred-year-old Black Gum tree. These mushrooms make up one of many species that make this area a biodiversity hotspot. Briana Heaney/WVPB
“They also are habitat for rare and endangered species,” Kane said. “And they really do enhance communities by the opportunities they offer our people to walk through them and enjoy the natural beauty and the hard work they are doing regarding the environment.”
Kane said he believes these ecosystems are an essential factor in combating climate change.
Once a forest is part of the Old Growth Forest Network, it is protected from being timbered. Volunteers who believe they have located an old growth forest can contact the organization and send sketches or photos of the forest. Then the organization starts to look a bit deeper into it. However, with the Burnwood forest the process was different.
“In this case, Doug Manning with the Park Service and Dr. Tom Saladyga, associate professor of geology at Concord, had done research on this forest together, and they approached us about its qualities as an old growth forest and said, ‘This is a great candidate’,” Kane said. “So then usually it would be good to verify it. And because they are both scientists, they had excellent data. They had done a coring; they had done the studies with their students from Concord University. So, it came together beautifully because they submitted to us a very complete piece of research.”
Kane said in many states there are no protections to removing old-growth trees from public lands and about half of all old growth forests have very little, or no, protections and can still be cut down.
“So that’s why we get concerned,” he said. ”When people begin to realize what a forest has endured to grow to this point, and how they are bellwethers of time, and they tell us such great stories about the past — they would really think differently about it.”
On a community walk on the Burnwood loop Rasso counted 32 different tree species he saw along the hike. To put that into perspective on the level of biodiversity this park has in trees alone, the United Kingdom only has 30 different species of trees in the entire country. Briana Heaney/WVPB
President Joe Biden signed an executive order in 2022 protecting old growth forests. The order stated that “Old growth forests on federal lands are critical to the health, prosperity and resilience of our communities” and that they will play an irreplaceable role in reaching new zero greenhouse gas emissions.”
And while the Old Growth Forest Network is working to protect existing old growth forest, national park rangers like Manning are working to help facilitate new old growth forest
“One of the really amazing things about our public lands, especially in national parks, is that we have forests that are on a trajectory to be that,” he said. “Maybe not in my lifetime, but there are people who are going to get to see 350 plus year old trees — in due time.”
The newly designated old growth forest and the Burnwood Trail that loops though it is across Highway 19 from the ranger station at the bridge park.
Visit the group’s website to find out more about old growth forests around you, or how to volunteer with the Old Growth Forest Network.
