Sabine National Forest
Sabine National Forest is located in East Texas near the Texas-Louisiana border. The forest is administered together with the other three United States national forests and two national grasslands located entirely in Texas, from common offices in Lufkin, Texas. There are local ranger district offices located in Hemphill.
The forest covers a total of in five counties - Sabine, Shelby, San Augustine, Newton, and Jasper. The Sabine National Forest is notable for extensive forests of American beech and other hardwood trees. Other important tree species include loblolly pine, longleaf pine, shortleaf pine, white oak, southern red oak, sweetgum, and Florida maple.
The Civilian Conservation Corps helped the Texas Forest Service develop the forest between 1933 and 1940. CCC Company 893 established camp near Pineland, Texas on June 14, 1933, and planted pine seedlings in the southern part of the forest. These men also built roads and fire lookout towers and completed the Red Hills Lake Recreation Area near Toledo Bend Reservoir. CCC Company 880 established camp near Center, Texas on October 26, 1933, and planted thousands of pine trees in an area that became the northern part of Sabine National Forest. The CCC built the Boles Field Campground, including a pavilion and amphitheater, in the forest near Shelbyville, Texas.
The Trail Between the Lakes is a hiking trail located in the southern portion of the national forest. It spans 28 miles between the Lakeview Recreation Area on Toledo Bend Reservoir, westward to US Highway 96, about 0.25 miles from the easternmost point of Sam Rayburn Reservoir. It was first conceived in 1981, with the final section completed in the fall 1990. It transects a variety of plant communities, topography, and streams with opportunities for birding and wildlife viewing. The trail is for hiking and primitive camping only, mountain bikes, horses, and off-road vehicles are not permitted.
The Indian Mounds Wilderness was officially designated as part of the National Wilderness Preservation System in 1984. The wilderness includes about 12,000 acres of low ridges and slopes with three drainages, Indian Creek, Bull Creek, and Hurricane Bayou. The area is named after four mounds, some as high as 40 feet, located to the southeast, just outside of the designated wilderness area. Locals once believed the mounds were earthworks constructed by the Caddoan Mississippian culture, however, archaeologists subsequently confirmed that they are natural formations and not Caddoan earthworks. A 1994 publication identified four champion trees in the wilderness area, three state champions, a flatwoods plum, a Florida sugar maple, and an eastern hop-hornbeam, as well as the national champion little-hip hawthorn. Some of the last strongholds of mature black hickory grow at higher elevations in the wilderness, while the slopes and lower elevations support the largest old growth forest of American beech and southern magnolia in US national forest, a threatened and declining plant community. The forest floor is noted for supporting a particularly wealthy array of fungi, mosses, liverworts, wildflowers, and ferns.
Fauna
Reptiles of piney woods in east Texas include a diverse variety of lizards and turtles such as coal skink, ground skink, six-lined racerunner, prairie lizard, alligator snapping turtle, razor-backed musk turtle, Sabine map turtle, river cooter, three-toed box turtle, and smooth softshell turtle. Although not particularly abundant in the forest, American alligator may be present in any lake, river, bayou or large body of permanent water in east Texas.Five species of venomous snakes occur throughout the forest of southeast Texas: Texas coralsnake, eastern copperhead, northern cottonmouth, and less commonly timber rattlesnake, and western pygmy rattlesnake. A few of the harmless species include eastern hog-nosed snake, prairie kingsnake, eastern coachwhip, broad banded watersnake, Texas ratsnake, red-bellied snake, and rough earthsnake.
Amphibians recorded in Sabine and Shelby counties include pickerel frog, Cope’s gray treefrog, Cajun chorus frog, Fowler’s toad, spotted salamander, three-toed amphiuma, and the Catahoula spotted dusky salamander, a species that has been disappearing throughout much of its range in Texas.
The fish of Sabine National Forest are largely associated with the Sabine River drainage. Some of the species recorded in the area include southern brook lamprey, Paddlefish, spotted gar, black bullhead, blue catfish, chain pickerel, yellow bass, green sunfish, Warmouth, dollar sunfish, and white crappie. A few of the smaller fish in the region include blacktail shiner, threadfin shad, Sabine shiner, golden topminnow, blackspotted topminnow, redspot darter, and bigscale logperch.