Barrens and Long Island pics

[Vespias]

http://s922.photobucket.com/albums/ad63 ... LI%20Pics/

OK, so we went out to the Long Island part of the Pine Barrens. It was amazingly hot... again... so we didn't spend all that much time in them. Having camped in the Redwood forests and uncountable oak and maple forests, they seem to have a bit of coolness to them. The Barrens forests have none of that. There is no lush canopy to keep the sun off and the heat once inside them can be oppressive. Loaded the few pics I did manage first so all the other stuff is before them.
Looking at them, I tried to give a sense of their density balanced by the few wide-open areas. I also wanted to show how they are cut repeatedly by roads and housing developements. And finally I wanted to show that without the canopy, on a full moon night you could see inside them perfectly fine and therefor could not mistake an owl or horse or bat for the Devil. Whatever people see there is exactly what they see... no mistake.

[Saturo]

Very beautiful pictures!

[Vespias]

TY Sat... just wanted to get these up so that people could see what the Barrens look like as well as some of the few spots on LI that don't turn my stomach.

[Karathyriel]

Hehehe...
From what I've read earlier, I thought the Barrens being some swampy, dark and sinister place...

Looks rather nice, though.

[Vespias]

Quite the opposite... as you can see. There are of course areas that get closer to the oceans where brackish water comes in but it's generally brite, sandy and .... barren.

[Mania]

I suppose I shouldn't be that it looks a good bit like the Florida pine flatwoods, eh? But I was picturing something darker also. Thanks for sharing those pictures!

[Teigan]

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[Karrosh]

Very nice pictures.

I've been to the barrens down in southern New Jersey. The three times I've been it has been in the middle of the night, and it was exceedingly spooky. My friend turned off the lights on his car and it was completely black, the dark just enveloped everything in an instant and you couldn't see a foot in front of you. Even when the lights were on, you could only see a thin little swath immediately in front of the car; with row after row after row of pine trees, stretching all the way to the coast, and for goodness knows how many miles in every other direction.

I need to go back there sometime in the daylight.

[mpd_84]

it does look like some of the pine forests here in florida.except that theres a lot less undergrowth.
it looks like someone mowed recently....

[Vephriel]

Wow, amazing! I gotta say, I expected something completely different. ^^ As others were saying above, I pictured much darker and swampier. I bet at night it looks pretty creepy though. :3

[Vespias]

On a cloudy night or new moon night, you literally can not see more than 2-3 feet in front of you without a flashlight. On a full moon night it looks almost as if someone had turned flourescent lights on somewhere above you. Then of course, all the trees come to life and the shadows are extremely creepy. But again, on such a night there;s no mistaking anything you see there.
As I said earlier, I would imagine these forests run the full length of the east coast and are just known by different names. Can't wait to check out the Florida versions of these.
Everyone expected the place where the famed Devil lives to be dark and spooky. Only the old medevil oak forests are like that. The redwood forests are very primordial and quite breathtaking when you enter them. The oak forests are the places of legend where you could hide armies of bowmen and witch castles. The Barrens are different. It's the kind of place where if you saw a hadrosaur amble by it wouldn't surprise you. Very hard to explain.

[Vephriel]

I saw a picture like this once of the Pine Barrens:

So that's the sort of dark, sinister woods I always imagined. :3

[Vespias]

Ahhhhh...that's a "burn area". The species of pine is Tar Pine so when there's a fire they release a very dark sap as they burn. As life returns to the burn areas any trees that did not die have the dark bases for a few years. Unfortunately, fires happen all too often but I guess that's nature's way of control...if not the Barrens would likely cover the country completely.