Even in the thickest spruce woods the ground is carpeted with leafy mosses and heather, and a rich variety of deciduous trees notably birch, ash, rowan, and aspen grow on even the steepest hillsides.
The blaze raged for more than three hours, the black smoke billowing out of the lower mouth of the tunnel on to a hillside thick with spruce, before being extinguished early in the afternoon.
After speaking with several friends on the cell phone, the boys apparently drove an old Ford Bronco owned by Michael's father down winding Route 151, past their two-story red-brick school, and aimed the speeding sport utility vehicle at a thick Norwegian spruce tree towering in front of the First Church of Christ.
What's more, the kill was deep in the darkest recesses of a thick stand of spruce.
The site offered few amenities, but the choice was felicitous for its thick and fragrant spruce forest and for the bald eagles that favor the area.
It dropped steeply for about 80 feet behind the yellow "ski area boundary" sign, and then quickly corkscrewed right into thick stands of spruce and fir.
From here a heavily washboarded gravel road slices through thick pine and spruce forest along the North Fork of the Flathead River, a forgotten corner near Glacier National Park and the Canadian border.
Back in Sept-Iles, waiting for the Montreal bus, I took a last look at the thick ranks of spruce crowding against the town's strip malls and neon signs.
Thick forests of spruce and pine predominate in the broad glacial valleys up to 2,800 feet (850 metres) above sea level in eastern Norway and 2,300 feet (700 metres) in the Trondheim region.
The most significant safety development is the introduction of more forgiving, flexible plastic birch as the fences' core structure rather than wood, which is then covered by a thick layer of spruce.
