Are you talking about the birch trees? They look like white birch.

Possibly Populus tremuloides (quaking aspen).

check for flat leaf stems.

At least in the high elevation forests of PA, white birches do not look like this. Much whiter bark, and shorter.

Therefore I agree with Bill.

Clue, there were several isolated specimens of these, even larger, on my forested oak, pine, hickory lot in mountainous southwest VA where I previously lived.

Yellow Birch?

tj

Aspen? I didn’t look at any comments i swear! Those are tall!

So in southern Wyoming there is a place called Aspen Alley. https://cowboystatedaily.com/2024/09/14/wyomings-famous-aspen-alley-is-getting-old-and-not-what-it-used-to-be/

Beng,

Without a leaf or other part of the tree that's a descriptor, it would be difficult for us to give an accurate id.

It may be a more widely spread tree that's an outlier but tbh, a tree that grew in SW Virginia doesn't give us a whole lot of information about the tree in your picture.

Populus deltoides is another candidate, that has white bark until it matures for several years.

Populus grandidentata bark is generally more grey in color with a different 'look'.

And there are others that aren't native to my area so I wouldn't have a clue if it was one of those.

To me, it really, really looks like Poplus tremuloides unless there is another Populus spp. that l don't know about, that looks pretty much the same.

Populus alba?

Ding. Ding. Ding. maackia gets it first. It's sorta surprising to me how many of these occur in my area and even down south in southwest VA where isolated big ones were in the canopy of the oak-pine-hickory forest -- several near 100 ft. On a mountain crest just west of me there are many saplings along the road-cut, tho they do occasionally occur down low near me as the pic shows.

Just to add, this is not a species to plant in a yard as they are notorious in suckering, tho they are handsome in an appropriate siting, standing out w/smooth, creamy-white bark above the lower furrowed trunk even on mature trees. They also don't get the autumn leaf-blight that I see often on other populars and cottonwoods & turn a pleasing yellow.

"this is not a species to plant in a yard as they are notorious in suckering, tho they are handsome in an appropriate siting"

When I was a little kid the first tree I actually "loved" was a P. deltoides at my bus stop. That doesn't mean I ever planted one!

I didn't even know there was a Populus alba, nor did I know Populus tremuloides occurred in the northeast...so I learned two things from this thread!

I first thought about p. grandidentata, after all bengs area is part of it's native range.

But what I've seen is the same as what the U of M describes.

' The bark on bigtooth aspen a green-gray and smooth, turning white-grayish and becoming furrowed with flat scaly ridges as it matures.'

https://trees.umn.edu/bigtooth-aspen-populus-grandidentata

So there must be geograhical differences?

The picture isn't real clear, but the lower bark looks to be furrowed, while the upper part of the trunk is smooth, similar to tremuloides. This is characteristic of this species in my part of the world. They also tend to grow on drier sites than tremuloides.

UBG, when I was attending VA Tech in Blacksburg, VA, there was an empty field near the city limit where a huge white poplar grew (Populus alba) and was surrounded by a sea of 15-20 ft tall suckers -- must have been a hundred of them.

PS Jay 6A, there's at least 2 Populus alba near me that I see regularly, one a medium tree and another a copse of suckers from an apparently cut stump. The tree gets the typical autumn leaf-blight....

We had mature Populus alba growing as a specimen tree in the front yard next door to where I grew up.

The suckers were aways 2-3x as tall as the grass and evenly distributed in a large radius (100 ft?) around that tree, every time dad mowed the grass.

iirc: There were 'scalped' roots showing, above ground, in the immediate area around that tree.