DAVIS, W.Va. -- More than 500,000 acres of red spruce forest once shaded the slopes of West Virginia's higher mountains, providing a cool, moist climate for the creatures living under its canopy.

But as railroad-borne logging crews worked their way into the state's highlands in the early 20th century, the days became numbered for this nearly unbroken expanse of virgin evergreen forest.

Red spruce was prized for its clear, knotless, straight-grained wood, used in everything from construction beams to soundboards for pianos and the support ribs of the Wright Brothers' first airplanes.

After virtually all of the red spruce logs had been chopped down and carted off, wildfires spread through the slashings of the decimated conifer stands. Farmers, roadbuilders and developers moved in, fragmenting what was left of the highland forest.

Only about 10 percent of the state's red spruce forest remains, in a patchwork of stands scattered across the state's higher elevations.

A coalition of public and private groups is trying to restore the red spruce to its former range by connecting remnant stands across the state's highlands.  Using an army of volunteers and seed stock collected from West Virginia trees, the three-year-old Central Appalachian Spruce Restoration Initiative plans to plant about 35,000 red spruce seedlings in West Virginia by the end of September.

Last Saturday, nearly 100 volunteers turned out to help with the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge planting. After refuge biologist Ken Sturm showed a group of WVU students the proper way to use a dibble bar -- a narrow-bladed spade used to create holes in which to plant seedlings, he gave them their marching orders for the day.

"Work in teams of two and plant on down to the stream and then up to the orange tape on the other side of it," he said. "And try not to spell out your name or the name of your school in trees," he added with a smile.

About 8,000 of the trees were planted on 56 acres at Idlemans Run on Saturday, and about 5,000 more were planted the following day on an old strip mine bench on both sides of the boundary line separating Blackwater Falls State Park from a section of the Monongahela National Forest.

Volunteers included college students from WVU and Davis & Elkins, family groups, off-duty state park, national forest and refuge personnel, members of The Nature Conservancy and Highlands Conservancy, students from the Davis Center, and area residents.

"Here in Canaan Valley, we're connecting spruce stands along stream corridors from the valley on up to the red spruce forests on top of Canaan Mountain and Cabin Mountain," said Sturm. "Last year, we planted along Freeland Run and Flatrock Run, and this year we're planting along Idlemans Run."

In addition to restoring a historic plant community to the refuge, the plantings "add habitat for species that rely on high-elevation spruce forests, like the West Virginia northern flying squirrel and the Cheat Mountain salamander," Sturm said. "Idlemans Run is a native brook trout stream. If it's shaded by red spruce, the water temperature is kept cool and good dissolved oxygen levels are maintained."

The spruce restoration effort began in Canaan Valley six years and 46,000 trees ago, as an offshoot of a project to protect the balsam fir. Often used a used as a Christmas tree when grown commercially, the balsam fir grows in only a few locations in West Virginia, where it is in danger of being wiped out by an invasive insect and an exploding population of deer, who browse on young firs.

Working with the staff at Canaan Valley Wildlife Refuge, volunteers from the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy began collecting balsam fir cones and extracting their seeds to protect the genetic make-up of nursery-raised trees used in a fir reforestation effort. The Highlands Conservancy's success with providing balsam fir seeds for regeneration led to a successful attempt to produce seed for red spruce.

"The red spruce forest is an iconic West Virginia habitat," said Thomas Minney of The Nature Conservancy in West Virginia, one of the organizations affiliated with CASRI. "It's beautiful, it supports brook trout and several threatened species and it's the scene for a lot of our high elevation recreation. And adding to it gives the entire forest more resiliency to deal with climate change."

When red spruce reforestation was first being considered at the refuge, there was no commercially available seed or rootstock in the country, according to Dave Saville, who launched the Conservancy's seed cone collection effort. "Nova Scotia was the closest place to get you could get it," he said. "No one was growing red spruce anywhere."

So Conservancy volunteers who collected balsam fir cones added the gathering of red spruce to cones to their repertoire.

"You can gather balsam fir cones by climbing up a ladder and picking them," said Saville. "But red spruce trees get broader the higher up you go -- and they can get pretty tall -- and the cones are at the ends of the branches.  So we let the squirrels cut them down for us, and steal some to use for collecting seeds."

The spruce cones are kiln dried to open them then run through a tumbler and a cement mixer to release their seeds. Next, a screening machine is used to free the seeds from their wing-like coverings, and the bare seeds are placed on a vibrating table, where constant shaking and gravity separate the heavier, viable seeds from empty pods. Samples of the seeds are X-rayed to determine seed purity and soundness before they are sent to a Weyerhauser facility where they are germinated and raised to the seedling stage.

West Virginia red spruce produced a bumper seed crop in 2006, according to Saville, when 10 bushels of cones collected by volunteers produced 10 pounds of seed, or about 1.43 million individual seeds. "The next year, a similar amount of cones produced about two ounces of seeds. It can vary a lot from year to year."

Since the spruce seed program began, interest in planting red spruce seedlings has gone beyond West Virginia public land agencies, according to Saville. Some surface mine operators are using the native evergreen as a more environmentally friendly alternative to the non-native Scotch pine and Norway spruce trees often planted on highland reclamation sites. The state of Maryland is using the West Virginia red spruce in high-elevation plantings along the state's western panhandle highways and in state parks and forests. Homeowners are interested in using the tree in landscaping projects.

"The Savage River Watershed Association in Western Maryland is using our red spruce to replace hemlock (now being decimated by an invasive insect) in shading trout streams over there," Saville said.

Funds raised from selling native red spruce seedlings to non-CASRI sources are used to pay for costs involved in collecting cones, distributing seedlings, and arranging food and shelter for volunteer planters.

Orders have been placed with Weyerhauser to deliver 50,000 seedlings raised from West Virginia seeds for planting in 2013. "We've been increasing the number of spruce seedlings we plant by about 5,000 each year," said Saville.

The red spruce restoration effort could spread into surrounding states in the years to come.  Saville said officials at the George Washington and Thomas Jefferson National Forest in Virginia have expressed an interest in planting spruce in the vicinity of that state's highest peak, Mount Rogers. National forests in the highlands of North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Tennessee are also possible locales for future red spruce plantings, he said.

Seed cones would need to be collected from trees in those areas, in order to protect the genetic integrity of the red spruce strain to be restored.

Once the fragmented tracts of West Virginia red spruce are connected again, "the trees will seed naturally and forest will fill in by itself," said CASRI coordinator Evan Burks. Since having a canopy of red spruce trees overhead lowers temperatures on the forest floor by several degrees, adding more acreage "will give species at risk from a warming climate more time to adapt or move on," Burks said.

"Canaan Valley is a really unique area, and it's great to be able to have a part in restoring it," said Nate Askins, a third-year volunteer and part of a group of 30 WVU students working as tree planters last weekend.  "It also lets me do something about reducing my carbon footprint."

"You can come back in 10 or 15 years and see the big spruce groves growing along this stream that you helped create," added Thomas Richard, a recent WVU grad and Askins' planting partner. "How could doing something like that not affect you?"

"I enjoyed doing this with the Scouts when I was a kid back in California," said Dale Moore of Glenville, who was planting trees with his wife, Shawna, and daughters Kittrick and Keaton. "I thought I'd let my daughters see what it's like and have a family outing at the same time."

Agencies participating in the CASRI project include the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the state Division of Natural Resources, the U.S. Forest Service, West Virginia State Parks, The Nature Conservancy, the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy

On April 22, the Nature Conservancy and CASRI are sponsoring an Earth Day tree planting on private land on Pharis Knob near Gandy Creek in Randolph County. Lunch will be provided. For details and directions, call Evan Burks, CASRI coordinator, at 304-637-0160.

CASRI will host another large tree-planting day in September, time and date be announced later.

Reach Rick Steelhammer at rsteelham...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5169.