I was goofing around with aerial view maps today, and discovered that I can exit my house and travel in a relatively straight line north-northeast for approximately 9 miles without leaving the local woods.
It wouldn’t be an easy slog; lots of wet area and streams to cross. Even a few paved roads to hazard. But I could be under the shade of trees for at least 98+% of the stroll.
How about your neighborhood?
I live out on the very edge of town. I’m pretty much the last house. There are woods on two sides of my house. There’s a cornfield across the street with woods on the other side of that.
Well, I live in a townhome complex - each yard has one tree. I have two trees in my back yard. So it’s not really forested. Behind my complex is a golf course. However, directly North of me is Deer Grove Forest Preserve - and that is freakin’ HUGE! So if I cross the street, I could go for a really, really long way without ever leaving the cover of the treees.
My neighborhood is quite wooded and walking south you’d pretty rapidly hit a combination of farms/previous farms and forest. A bit further and you’d be in a wooded hiking area.
None at all, north side of Chicago. The only greenery is Wrigley Field
We’re inside the DC Beltway, but there are tons of trees. Usually all we see is green on the Google Earth shot.
I live in Mexico City, about a half hour drive to the edge of the city. The city itself is obviously heavily urbanized but I’ve always been surprised to see how the rural areas to the west, east and south-east outside the city limits are thickly forested with pines.
Thisis my county. If you put in 20635, then zoom out a little bit, you’ll see a wooded area to the northeast. I live among those trees. The roads in our neighborhood are paved, but lots are 3 acres or more and most are heavily treed - few people have cleared their lots.
But not forested, per se. There are enough fenced yards that you can’t go exploring willy-nilly.
Urban St. Paul, gridlock blocks of houses with elm or maple trees in the front yard, and usually at least one tree in the back yard. So, I’d walk for a while before I wasn’t around trees, but I wouldn’t call it “the woods.”
All the lots in our neighborhood are heavily treed. Large mature ones. Our lot is particularly heavily treed. Oaks that are 4+ diameter at the base. Almost all the subdivisions around us are like that since they are older. Unfortunately, the newer ones are cleared and graded off nowadays. (Jerks.) But those are sparse in our vicinity.
I did a check on Google Maps. It looks like the the longest continuous straight line that goes thru mainly treed subdivisions and undeveloped stuff runs about 12 miles NW to SE. Then you hit major roads with commercial development. There is one part where that skims the edge of a parking lot.
There are not a lot of just plain “woods” around. But our lot backs up to a good sized one. The kids used to spend hours playing in the woods when they were little.
Tall trees are pretty hard to come by in the desert, and most of the ones around here are non-natives that have been carefully planted and tended. The only “woods” around here are in the mountains or the riverbanks, and even those aren’t “woods” of the type I think you mean. There are national forests in this area where the most heavily wooded areas still won’t provide you a lot of shade if you’re taller than, say, 5’10". You have to get into some fairly high mountains before you get even somewhat tall trees around here.
Our neighborhood is in the middle of a forest preserve. The neighborhood is to the north and west of us. Directly across the road and beginning less than a quarter of a mile south, it’s woods for at least a couple of miles.
I’m pretty forested, despite living in a housing development in suburbia. From my back deck, I can only see one house at a time, even though there are six houses within 150 feet of me. (Three of them are so screened by trees, I can’t see them from anywhere on my property, but I do hear their kids playing during the summer.)
I back up to a greenbelt, so I can easily cover a mile without having to venture out of the cover of trees. I think, if I was willing to get creative and hop through a few backyards, I could actually walk another couple of miles to the power company’s right-of-way. The right-of-way is about a 100 yard-wide green belt surrounding their high power transmission lines. If I could get there, then I could literally walk 20 miles under cover of trees. (In fact, this being the Pacific Northwest, I suspect the only things stopping me from calling that hundreds of miles are rivers, oceans and the Cascades.) I know that both coyote and deer use the utility right-of-way as a highway to get into suburbia whenever they’re short of water or food.
We have trees around us, but they don’t form continuous shade. If it were for people planting them I suspect this would all still be largely open prairie.
Well, it’s Portland, which has one of the largest urban forest canopies in the country.
There are two forested parks and a wetland preserve within walking distance of my house, and of course the streets are lined with trees. One street a couple blocks away nearly looks like a tunnel because of the mature trees along the park blocks. Alaska has a lot of trees, but unfortunately most of the trees in downtown Anchorage were cut down by developers. My old neighborhood there bordered a greenbelt and there were a lot of trees in the development, which was nice.
My house is in a development just old enough that they didn’t know they were supposed to bulldoze all the trees. Also all utilities underground, rare around here. I’m content.
I live in downtown Panama City, but there are palms and other trees on my street. In fact there are quite a few trees in the neighborhood, including along streets, in yards, and in parks. I see parrots and parakeets in my neighborhood regularly, and I even saw a toucan last week.
I could probably walk up to Metropolitan Park, which is maybe a couple of miles away, without ever being out of sight of a tree if I chose my route well. And once there, I could walk through mostly unbroken forest for dozens of miles, since it borders on a string of other parks.
Across the road in front of my house there are only a couple dirt driveways and/or farm roads within about 7 miles.
Behind my house there are no trees for a few hundred miles.
Larry McMurtrey wrote about “Houston, with its sexy trees.” He went to grad school at Rice after a youth in the more treeless parts of the state.
I live in an old neighborhood near downtown, with numerous mature trees. I think there’s some natural growth down along White Oak Bayou. The sprawling metropolitan area is a patchwork of bleak areas & bosky ones; the far Northeast suburbs encroach on the Piney Woods.
We lost lots of trees during the drought a few years ago. But there are plenty left…
Our condo complex has parkland on two sides. Had we been able to afford a place on the other side of the parking lot, and my SO not afraid of snakes dropping out of trees and onto the balcony, the view from our living room would have been a forest rather than a street. A few hundred feet from our front door is an entrance to the W&OD Trail.