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Bristlecone Eclipse, Doyle Peak, June 2011
High up on the side of the mountain I paused for a moment beneath a grand old bristlecone pine skeleton, lifted my gaze heavenwards, and watched through slitted eyelids as the white-hot disc of the sun slipped behind one of the old tree's limbs. I stood rapt, feeling the warmth of the sun on my face, transfixed by the slow alchemy of perspective, tree, and flaring solar corona.
Disseminating Moon over Ponderosa, Flagstaff, AZ, June 2011
It is what it is: a picture of the moon I took this morning on my way into work.
Clouds building over Mt. Elden, June 2011
I hiked up Mt. Elden this afternoon to experience the sheer power of the planet's atmosphere, to revel in the thundering passage of the Anemoi over the mountain top. The wind was gusting very hard out of the southwest at the summit, perhaps 60 or 70 mph or even more near the towers. The gusts were powerful enough to knock me backwards and force me to lean into them to stay vertical.
Clouds building over Mt. Elden, June 2011
I didn't stay long, lingering only long enough to drink some water and listen to the howl of the wind through the guy wires and observe the manically twisting, gyrating aspen near the microwave towers. This place is not safe for you now! they seemed to cry out, their normally peaceful, fluttery voices a deafening hiss of alarm.
I heeded their warning and descended back down the trail to where the wind, while still strong, was much less dangerous. Perhaps in exchange for allowing the mountain to complete its dance with the wind spirits unobserved I was rewarded with some good light to photograph clouds building above the summit.
Plumes of Pine Pollen over Flagstaff, June 2011
Maybe it's just my slightly skewed perspective on the forests and ecosystems of northern arizona, but when I saw the great yellow plumes of pine pollen blowing out of the trees around Flagstaff I couldn't help but hear ironic laughter echoing through the landscape. That the trees would suddenly produce record pollen just as Wally Covington and ERI's 4FRI project is back in the news would seem to be the grandest of ironies. I'm sure the joke is not lost on Wally, although I doubt he sees much humor in these trees' reproductive shenanigans.
Pine Pollen over Flagstaff, June 2011
In a few years when the pinecones from this year's unusually heavy pollen have dropped we're going to find ourselves up to our asses in ponderosa seedlings. There'll be so many cones and seeds that the squirrels are going to be too fat and lazy to bother darting across the roads anymore, foregoing death-by-Goodyear for obesity-related heart disease and diabetes. 4FRI's contractors will be working overtime trying to figure out what to do with all the damn seedlings cropping up in places they've already thinned and burned. And good ol' Wally, surrounded by the next generation of doghair pine thickets, will find himself looking a bit like Jim Kirk in the classic Star Trek episode The Trouble with Tribbles.
The Trouble with Tribbles
All joking aside, this is the worst I've seen the pine pollen, and I've been living in and around the ponderosa pine forests of Arizona all my life. It's been bad before, but I've not seen the sky take on a yellowish tint for days and days at a time like we saw these past couple of weeks. It seems to have begun to taper off now, but for a while there I could see the plumes of pollen drifting overhead through my polarized sunglasses. Very strange. Very strange indeed.
Bristlecone Pine Cone, Doyle Peak, June 2011
The above picture is of a Rocky Mountain Bristlecone Pine cone, Pinus aristata, growing near Doyle Saddle on the San Francisco Peaks. The tree it was growing on is one of a small isolated population of bristlecones surviving here in Arizona, found only on our beloved Peaks. The rest of the aristatas live in Colorado and northern New Mexico some 350 miles away, making this relict population very, very special.
Every time I see bristlecones on my hikes I can't help but wonder how long it's been since they split away from their kin growing in the southern Rockies. Undoubtedly they came down here as part of some Pleistocene Ice Age migration of boreal forest and then took refuge on this sky island mountain ahead of the warming climate. It's fun to think of the tales they might tell, if only they could speak.
Young Bristlecone Pines, Doyle Peak, June 2011
Rocky Mountain Bristlecone are a very long-lived species, sometimes growing for up to 2,500 years. According to the WikiPedia article, most Rocky Mountain Bristlecones rarely make it to over 1,500 years, though. On the Peaks stand-replacing fire is a semi-frequent visitor so it's doubtful that many of our bristlecone pines are even close to that grandfatherly old age. In fact, most of the bristlecones growing now along the Doyle Saddle area where I took the photographs can't be much older than about 120 years, as a devastating fire swept through that location in the late 1880s, wiping much of the slope clean of trees.
If you look closely at the trees north of Doyle Saddle you will notice that they are all of even size and relatively thin in girth. Lying half-hidden and jackstrawed in among these relatively young trees are silvered old spruce and bristlecone logs, the remnants of the forest that was there before the fiery cataclysm burned through. What's really interesting is that those logs are also not particularly thick or particularly large, evidence that that prior generation of forest was likely only a few centuries old when it was taken, too. This would've been long before european settlement. Think cycles of naturally occurring catastrophic fire, burning through these places every few centuries.
This cycle of stand-replacing fire is pretty normal for these high elevation mixed conifer forests, as they tend to remain moist enough to resist fire most years and will accumulate heavy fuel loads over long periods. The forest around the snowbowl and lower Humphreys Trail is a great example of this buildup. Eventually there is a really dry time and they burn in a big way, as we saw on the highest portions of Schultz Peak and on Doyle itself during the 2010 Schultz Fire. Of course you can read about this phenomenon in forestry and ecology textbooks but it's still cool to go up there and see it for yourself, get the straight dope directly from the trees themselves so to speak. So in a way the trees do speak and tell tales, giving clues to their past and probable futures.
The End of the Trail, June 2011
Sunday I hiked up the Weatherford Trail to have a look at the Inner Basin. The trail was blocked by deep snow just past Doyle Saddle on the steep north face of Freemont Peak. You could see where others had postholed on, but I turned back, unwilling and ill-equipped to tangle with the lingering remnants of Winter.
Lingering Snow on Agassiz Peak, June 2011
Sometime over the winter the Weatherford Trail between the wilderness boundary and the saddle had turned into a challenge course of downed trees and mangled limbs. Several of the blowdowns are incredibly huge - stately old snags (spruce and Douglas fir) so large that a team of horses and men equipped with crosscut saws could not remove them. They will become permanent fixtures on the trail. In some places it appeared as if the old road's banks had begun to collapse, the compromised slope spilling half an aspen grove down onto the trail, the mountain continuing the slow work of reclaiming the roadbed. I felt sad about the loss of more of our precious aspen, but I understood what the forces of change were up to and in a way I was glad to see the mountain still breathing and awake.
I had to laugh: The wilderness trail register above aspen spring was stuffed with complaints about the blowdowns and poor trail conditions, the half-illegible vitriol spilling out of the lines and scrawled across the margins of the sign-in sheets. It was the work of anonymous Internet-age clowns bitching and moaning into thin air, their rancor aimed at the faceless bureaucrats they think read their comments.
And really, what exactly were they expecting to find up there in that wilderness? A wheelchair-accessible ramp all the way up to Doyle Saddle? Smiling docents waiting to guide them past vaguely unnerving 1:8-scale dioramas of spruce trees, complete with tiny hikers and tiny trail runners?
Sunrise over Humphreys Peak, May 2011
I thought this picture of the sun rising above Humphreys Peak from the Arizona Trail was worth posting. I had to lay down in the grass to get this one, which was kind of unpleasant as it was below freezing at the time. The camera's autofocus kept keying in on the grass in the foreground so it was kind of a tough shot to get. I must've taken twenty exposures as I fiddled with the exposure and focus. I wish I'd gotten there about fifteen minutes earlier and caught the sun just as it came over the tip of the peak. I bet it'd take some heavy-duty GIS/trigonometry to figure out precisely what time you'd need to be at a particular location to catch the sun rising over a mountain top like that.
I like playing around with the lens flares and experimenting with exposure compensation. Any of you photography nuts out there know if it's bad for your camera's sensor to have the sun directly in the field of view like this? So far nothing bad seems to have come from it -- at least the camera hasn't gone blind or anything...
The Great Sea of Gambel Oak, Mt. Elden, June 2011
Saturday I hiked up Mt. Elden to see if the smoke plume from the Wallow Fire burning some 160 miles away in eastern arizona was visible from the summit. I wasn't really expecting to directly sight the pyrocumulus cloud itself as even at 30,000+ feet tall the top should've been beyond the horizon at this distance. However, I suspect that the white haze on the far horizon in the above panorama was the smoke drifting north and backwashing to the west over the far painted desert region.
On the way down the Heart Trail I was struck by how green and healthy the post-Radio Fire Gambel Oak community on that part of the mountain is. Gambel Oak is one of my favorite tree species so it's always nice to be among them. Higher up the slope after you leave the aspen it is very exposed so dropping into the lush oak forest below is a welcome respite from the glaring sun of the Heart Trail.
Gambel oak, sometimes called scrub oak, is pretty common in these parts and seems to have done particularly well after the fire. It makes sense that they would: they are a drought tolerant pioneer species and love to grow in sunny places with thin, rocky soils. And like aspen they have evolved defensive mechanisms to protect themselves from wildfires, so they love these burned areas. I have a sneaking suspicion that they fill much the same ecological niche as the aspen do but at lower, drier elevations. In fact, I have seen gambel oak supplanting fading aspen clones south of Flagstaff and Mormon Lake, the oaks happily moving into the places where the aspen have died.
In the Sea of Gambel Oak, Mt. Elden, June 2011
If you hike from the Sandy Seep trailhead you begin to enter the "sea of oak" (as I like to call it) just after you get onto the Heart Trail proper. The environment really changes when you get back in there, becoming more enclosed, brushier, and wilder. When the trees get their leaves in mid to late May the area becomes a maze of oak clusters, grassy drainages, and twisting corridors. It is perfect habitat for many types of birds like Black-headed Grossbeaks, woodpeckers, and Steller's Jays. You can also see big old jackrabbits, mule deer, foxes, and coyote. One time I was amazed to see a mule deer fawn being chased by a coyote who was in turn being chased by the fawn's mother! The trio bounded right past me on the trail, one after the other, none of them even noticing that I was standing there.
With this region expected to become hotter and drier due to climate change Gambel Oak will probably become even more prevalent here. The oak will move higher up the mountains and expand into new habitat, taking over from previous tenants like Ponderosa, Douglas fir, and aspen, which will in turn push higher yet. Unfortunately the preferred mechanism for this migration will probably not be pretty or pleasant to us: fire and beetle infestations that clear the stage for the newcomers.
Sunrise over Humphreys Peak, 6:45AM, May 30, 2011
My Memorial Day hike began with watching the sun rise over Humphreys Peak from upper Hart Prairie. The sun's disc took barely a minute to clear the mountain, the scene transitioning from deep shadow to blazing sunlight so quickly I was left breathless in the freezing cold.
I understand that the arizona snowbowl's expansion project will affect the area where I took the photograph. Judging from the environmental impact statement map I believe the field where I was standing will soon be turned into a large parking lot and that the trees in the background and to the left will be removed to make room for the snowplay/tubing area. The catchment pond for snowmaking will be off to the left beyond the edge of the picture.
