emergent
John,
What I meant is that the tree was a solitary or stand-alone pine that emerges well above the surrounding canopy. I've attached another photo to show this. The big pine is on the right. Another 120' range pine with half the diameter is on the left. It is an optical illusion of the photo angle with respect to the forest edge that makes it appear that the hardwoods are taller to the rigth.
The pines in this area are typically separated by 100-400 yards and extend at least a mile to the southwest. They are located in a relatively flat area with little topographical variation, so there is no uphill overshadowing by neigboring trees to drive adjacent trees higher to reach sunlight. Additionally, there are no dense pine groves to drive heights any higher due to competition. The pines are located in a sugar/red maple forest that is stunted and distorted with some ironwood (hophornbeam). At the ground level, most maples, poles or saplings, are bent, crooked, or even horizontal from lake effect snow load. This can be seen to some extent in the photo in my original post. A friend of mine jokes that they are a new species, Acer horizontalis. The pines seem to handle the snow load much better and emerge well above the maples, while the maples NEVER achieve a size that one would expect in a virgin, old growth, or primary forest.
This area receives an extremely large amount of snow since it is in the Lake Superior snow belt. It is just far enough inland to receive snow while the lakeshore area receives rain in early spring and late fall. It is just close enough to the lake to receive extremely large amounts of snow. There are no weather stations in the immediate area, but it is probably higher than areas similar distances from the lake up and down the shore because of the effects of the Porcupine Mountains nearby. Because of these characteristics in this area just northeast of Mirror Lake, we didn't spend much time big tree hunting here in the past due to the diminished height potential in this area. However, the large girths might make up for it.
By contrast, pines in northeast central Wisconsin in similar forest routinely exceed 130 feet such as in the Cathedral Pines and Giant Pine Grove in the Nicolet National Forest. The only major differences are lower latitude coordinates, slightly lower altitude, and much less annual snow load. In the Cathedral Pines, a couple trees reach 150' with good form. Some of them also used to have trunk lengths exceeding 160' but had horizontal, bent over tops due to snow loading, partially because of excessive height to diameter ratio due to increased competition from very tall maples that don't suffer any significant lake effect snow loads. Most of these examples of extremely long, bent top trees have fallen in recent years.
Hopefully, I haven't rambled on too much...
