Hartwick Pines (one I'm familiar with) has an accessible asphalt trail through it. It's not undiscovered.
It's also cheesy that the wiki list gives the size of the park reserve rather than the size of the actual old growth stand. The full article gives the much smaller size of 49 acres of remaining old growth forest rather than the 9,642 acres given in the list.
People estimate that the Michigan lumber boom was larger (in value extracted) than the California gold rush. They cut down almost everything.
Randomly spot checking (first click), the Cathedral Pines in CT also lists the size of the preserve, even though the resources talk about the forest being damaged by tornadoes. It's more problematic in that a number for the old growth isn't obvious.
What does discovery have anything to do with it? The article makes a different claim.
> What we now call “old-growth” forests are simply communities of trees that have been allowed to continue on undisturbed while most of the forest around them has been thinned or cut down entirely. In North America, even places that look thickly forested to us now are often full of relatively young trees, regrown on patches of land that were farms not so long ago.
I recently visited Cook Forest [1] in northwest Pennsylvania and it is breathtakingly beautiful. It's not just quantitatively different (bigger trees) but also qualitatively -- all towering evergreens in a very deciduous state. It's really sobering to think of how much we lost by clearcutting before we started to think about conservation seriously in the last 120 years or so.
Hmm. That's a pretty broad list. I live right outside the Smokies for example, and hike quite a lot in and around the park. Old growth trees are rare enough that individuals get called out in trail guides, let alone the quite unique entire stands that are at least pre-colonization. Maybe I'll try to add some specificity to that section.
Most of my data came from Eastern Old-Growth Forests by Mary Bird Davis. She defined old growth as forests that were never logged or that are so old that there is no longer any evidence of logging.
The thing with many eastern forests is that because of either their species composition or their site conditions (soil, climate, etc), their trees will never get very large.
What I remember about the Smokies is that no one knew exactly how much they were logged, but the National Park Service estimated about 60 to 70 percent. Most of the remaining unlogged forests won't really have huge trees. In fact, some huge tulip trees that are popular hiking destinations are less than two hundred years old, while small hemlocks on ridges can be over three hundred years old.
Oh, awesome! And yeah, I know plenty of them don't get that big as they age, not every tree can rely on being fed the way the giants out west are haha. It's an unfortunate situation here these days, pollution, disease, and invasives have really damaged things, and it's pretty clear to see.
I guess I was mostly thinking about the general conception a lot of people tend to have that when they go to something like a national park (particularly in the east), that it's been completely untouched by time, when in fact we had fairly indiscriminate industry and war that giant swathes of places that were only received protections in the early 20th century and beyond.
Oh, and if we're sharing pics of big/interesting trees I would be remiss to skip the road trip where I was fortunate enough to see fat trees[1], dead trees[2], and rare trees[3].
Well done on starting the list. I chipped in a bit on Australia, though I'm frankly quite amazed at how difficult it is to find any sort of authoritative list of locations! There are clearly thousands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_old-growth_forests#Uni...
Disclosure: I compiled most of the list.