Tall Timber

Since 1963, West Virginians have helped the state keep a register of its biggest trees. Could one be in your backyard?

It only takes Craig Mohler about five minutes to explain how to make a clinometer, an instrument that measures vertical slope. He begins by listing the supplies needed to make one: a ruler, a protractor, tape, a straw, some string, and something heavy—like a washer—to weigh the string down.

It might sound like an elementary school craft project gone awry, but the clinometer is a classic tool of surveying, used to measure the height of objects too tall for tape measures.

Mohler, the editor of the weekly Monroe Watchman newspaper, uses his clinometer for hunting. Big tree hunting, that is.

A few years ago, Mohler took his two sons and the rest of the Monroe County 4-H Club into the woods to search for record-breaking trees. West Virginia’s Big Tree Registry, operated by the state Division of Forestry, draws hundreds of nominations every year, and Mohler and the club hoped to find a record-breaker in the woods of Monroe County.

“I happened to run across the West Virginia program and noticed there were no Monroe trees on there. I thought there are probably some (record breakers) here but no one had looked into it,” Mohler says.

With homemade clinometer in tow, Monroe and the club spent two days searching for potential state champions, eventually happening upon a few trees the group submitted to the competition: a white oak that they hope will place in the top five, a few white pines, and a shagbark hickory. But they’re most confident about a cucumber tree, which they hope will take the No. 1 spot. “It’s very near Union in a field just south of town. A very massive tree, much bigger than anything on the state list,” Monroe says of the cucumber tree.

Scoring Champions

Bob Hannah, coordinator of the Division of Forestry’s Urban and Community Forestry Program, oversees the state’s Big Tree Program, which was founded in 1963. “We receive online nominations from the public, and we also end up finding a lot of trees ourselves through our foresters being in the woods themselves working with landowners,” he says.

Each submission contains the tree’s circumference, height, and crown spread. Circumference is measured in inches at breast height, or 4.5 feet from the base of the tree. Height is measured in feet. Crown spread, the distance in feet across the outermost leaves of the crown, is calculated by taking two measurements: one at the widest spread and a second at a 90-degree angle to the first measurement.

Once the circumference, height, and crown spread are determined, foresters add the total circumference and height to one-fourth of the crown spread for an aggregate score. The tree with the highest score becomes the biggest tree of that species on record. Some of the trees on the record books are only a few feet tall, but their size is nevertheless the biggest on record for their species.

Based on the scoring system, the largest tree on record in the state is a sycamore that grows near Viola in Marshall County. This tree has a 311-inch circumference, a 128-foot crown spread, and stands 117 feet tall for a total score of 460 points. There are taller trees on the register, including a yellow poplar in Nicholas County that stands 173 feet tall, but none have a higher score than the Marshall County sycamore.

Nominations in hand, foresters head out across the state—typically in the wintertime when leaves are off the trees and there are no bugs or poison ivy leaves—to verify the locations and measurements of the trees. “We have six staff to inspect trees across the state,” Hannah says.

Some West Virginia trees have gone on to become national champions. The state currently has four trees on the national register of champion trees, a list founded in 1940 and maintained by the nonprofit American Forests: an Aspen bigtooth in Pocahontas County with a score of 228 points, a table mountain pine in Hardy County with a score of 165 points, a mountain maple in Monongalia County with a score of 83 points, and a fanleaf hawthorn in Harrison County with a score of 103 points.

The state Division of Forestry doesn’t publish the addresses or GPS coordinates of the trees to protect the privacy of landowners. However, there are plenty of state champs in public areas that people can visit. For example, the state’s largest horse chestnut grows on West Virginia University’s downtown campus, 100 feet east of Armstrong Hall. The largest fleshy hawthorn can be found in the parking lot of the Canyon Rim Center at Pipestem State Park.

Hunting for Winners

Turner Sharp, who retired from the wood products industry, has spent the last decade working on bringing West Virginia’s Big Tree Program register up to date and tracking down state champions. “I’ve always been around trees, and we live in an area that’s got a pretty good mixture of trees. Every once in a while we come across a tree that’s visually stunning and impressive,” says Sharp, who lives in Parkersburg.

The register had been revised periodically since the original version in 1963. The Division of Forestry published the list in booklet form in 2001, which led to a rapid increase in the number of tree nominations.

Sharp took an interest in the registry around 2008. As he flipped through, he started to spot some obvious errors. One tree, for instance, appeared in the registry twice because it had been measured by two different hunters standing at different angles. He drove to the Division of Forestry’s office in Guthrie, where he brought the issue up with Assistant State Forester Dan Kincaid. “He said, ‘Well, would you like to update it?'”

That’s when Sharp began traveling the state, checking on the registered state champions and inspecting new nominations. To his surprise, he found that a quarter of the trees on the original list were no longer there. “I corrected all the obvious mistakes—duplications, misspellings, bad indentifications—then I set up a program that we inspect every tree periodically,” he says.

Now, all trees on the register are inspected on a 10-year cycle. Foresters make sure they are still alive and record new measurements. Sharp helps, too, checking out existing entries and new nominations with a laser rangefinder to measure height, a clinometer to measure angles, and a tape measure to check circumference.

In 2012, Sharp’s tree hunting landed him on the national champions list. He found a mountain maple that was 40 feet tall with a 2-foot circumference. Many of the trees only grow 12 feet tall with a one-inch diameter. “It was bigger than any mountain maple ever nominated except for one in the great Smoky Mountains,” he says.

Finding New Records

The Big Tree Register boasts trees from all around the state, and potential winners could be in your backyard. Sharp encourages anyone planning a big tree hunt to first look at the register to see where current champions are located and to become familiar with the size of the current champs in your area. If you have an iPhone, download Leafsmart—a free and helpful app that identifies tree species using photos of their leaves.

Once you think you’ve found a champion, attempt to measure it. A laser rangefinder like Sharp’s can be purchased online for around $200, but trees can also be measured with homemade clinometers like Mohler’s. Sharp says hunters should not to be afraid of making errors in identifications or measurements. “Even foresters make the same errors. I’ve made species misidentifications before,” he says.

Hannah, Sharp, and state foresters are working now to update the Big Tree Register, which was last revised in 2016. Mohler is waiting to see if his nominations will make it onto the new version. “It was fun to do, and I really enjoyed introducing the kids to it,” he says. “So much of what kids do is tied in with electronics and computers and phones. Something that really appealed to me was getting the kids outdoors in the woods and doing hands-on stuff.”

If they’re successful, it will be a 4-H outing for the record books. wvcommerce.org/bigtrees

This story was originally published in the September 2018 issue of  Wonderful West Virginia. To subscribe, visit  wonderfulwv.com.

written by Amelia Ferrell Knisely