What types of forests were present before settlement?
When settlers arrived they found open pine forests on dry, south facing slopes and ridges, which contained primarily ponderosa pine trees. They also found mixed conifer forests that were dominated by pine, but also contained other species. These forests looked almost exactly like pine-dominated forests but contained scatterings of Douglas fir, grand fir, larch, Englemann spruce, and lodgepole. This type of forest grew on moist sites such as north facing slopes and along streambeds. Although these two forests types appeared to be very similar, they grew in areas with different water availability. Both the ponderosa pine and mixed conifer communities experienced light ground fires every 10-12 years and stand replacing fires at intervals of several hundred years In addition to the south facing slope pine-dominated and the mixed conifer communities, two other types of forests existed in the Blue Mountains. The first is known as the north-slope fir-larch type forest, a dense, dark forest in
