Bahar Nature Preserve

Within the folds of farmland next to Skaneateles Lake, lies the Finger Lakes Land Trust’s 53-acre Bahar Nature Preserve, a hidden forest that calls to visitors yearning for an enchanted retreat. The mature mixed northern hardwood/hemlock forest on the Preserve is part of a larger forest block that fills the Bear Swamp Creek gorge, and extends through the adjacent Carpenter Falls State Unique Area and private lands. Although most evidence of an old mill disappeared many years ago, a trail that has been used for more than a century, referred to by locals as the “Jug Path”, takes hikers along the south rim of the gorge, where they are treated to dramatic views into the 100-foot-deep Bear Swamp Creek ravine. The preserve extends across the creek and up the other slope.

While the forest in the Preserve that is found on the gently-sloping terrain around the rim of the Bear Swamp Creek gorge was logged on and off over the last couple hundred years (most recently in the 1970’s), the forest in the deep gorge was mostly inaccessible because of the steep slopes, and likely harbors a significant area of “old growth”. Eastern hemlock trees dominate the steep slopes, and red oak is dominant elsewhere. Other species include: white pine, American beech, sugar and red maple, white ash, black cherry, American basswood, yellow birch, and tulip tree. Hemlock, red oak, and tulip trees are often over 24" dbh, and some very large oaks are certainly well over 100 years old. In 2006 two trees in the Preserve, an American chestnut and a yellow birch, were winners in the Cayuga County "Big Tree Contest"

Orenda – The Value of Old Growth Forests, from a Seneca Indian Perspective

by Mike DeMunn/Da hā da’ Nyah:—forester, member of the Hawk Clan of the Seneca Nation of Indians, and longtime friend of the Finger Lakes Land Trust

February 2023

Many years ago, my Seneca Clanmother who was then in her eighties, told me about what her
grandmothers had seen in the mid-1800s. They were born in the 1840s and saw the hills still covered
with the original virgin forest, now called old growth.

The grandmother saw elk, wolf, cougar, moose, fish in every stream, and passenger pigeons so
many in number they darkened the sky. They saw white pine over 160 feet tall and beneath them grew
all the plant medicines the people needed to heal themselves.

The original forest was the world that Indian people had lived in and whose culture was formed
and made from. For us to walk in an old growth forest stand today is to be in a living remnant of the
world our ancestors knew. Ours is an oral tradition and the old growth that still survives has priceless
stories to tell us, and is the place to return to when we have lost our way and are not sure of our
direction in the changing chaos of the world around us.

Old growth forests are the place of the original Orenda – the mystery and great potence; the
source of all life in the forest where all things come from and return to, in the way it has always been.

Mike DeMunn
Da hā da’ Nyah: