What is the Northwoods with No ‘Woods’?

I always know I’ve reached the Northwoods when I see the straight lines of tall pine trees along the side of the highway, like soldiers at attention. Besides the occasional break made by a gas station or an intersecting highway, trees are the only things visible on either side of the road. Once I start to see water, though, and bridges over the rivers start popping up, it’s never long before I make it to my grandparents’ house just outside the town of Eagle River, Wisconsin. 

Growing up, my family visited my grandparents every summer. We spent much of our time shopping at the downtown center, mini golfing, and swimming and boating in the chain of rivers and lakes. My most striking memories, however, are the hours and days spent beneath the pine needle canopy. I love the smell of the pines and the rustling of the breeze through the trees, accompanied by the flow of the river not far away. I spent hours at a time trekking through the woods, making my way through the constant ferns and exploring in any direction that caught my interest (always while keeping in mind my grandmother’s warning that there may be bears). Each new path brought its own adventures, and I was the explorer sent to find the best the forest had to offer. One day this might mean a rock with a particularly thick cover of moss, and the next it could be a patch of spiderwebs or wild raspberries. 

These experiences in the woods around my grandparents’ have shaped my love of nature and plants, from the familiar fern and pine of the Northwoods to my abundant house plants. Looking at those woods now through the eyes of a budding biology student, I see things I didn’t notice when I was younger. The happiness I felt as a kid is tinged with a certain sadness, a realization of all the forests that had been lost. The hours I spent playing in what seemed to be endless woods aren’t possible now, because the woods were never as endless as I thought. Long before I was born, logging destroyed almost all of Wisconsin’s woodlands, and the current forests are comparatively small and young, usually composed of planted pine trees less than one hundred years old. These soldiers, which I still recognize on my way up North, really are standing in rows at attention, rising tall in the spots where they were purposefully spaced and planted. 

The grand adventures I went on as a child in endless woods are not possible. I love and cherish those memories, but I feel the pang of loss for that imagined forest, a forest that could have been once upon a time. Today, my beloved trees still aren’t safe. Continued logging and fragmentation—the splitting apart of previously continuous forest—has caused declines in biodiversity and resiliency. This is leaving forests increasingly vulnerable to invasive species, deer grazing, and some of the more disruptive effects of a changing climate: warmer temperatures and more extreme weather. If things don’t change, we face not only the loss of previous forests, but even the loss of the woods we have today. There are ongoing efforts focused on protecting and restoring these ecosystems, with tree planting initiatives and community involvement in forest management on the rise. However, there’s still a lot of work to be done if we want the woods to stick around in the future.