Delirious Ramblings

At the Bristlecone Wall

The Bristlecone Wall, Kachina Peaks Wilderness, January 2012

When I finally reached the thin green line of prostrated bristlecone pines on Agassiz Peak the trees presented me with a choice: If I blundered my way through their ranks and up the summit ridge I would be allowed to stand atop the mountain with only ravens and the blue air above. But the price of that rocky pinacle would be very high: the sound of those trees' ancient limbs cracking and snapping under my weight, of seeing my bootprints pressed carelessly into the cindery alpine tundra. Or... I could willingly abort my climb there at the base of the bristlecone wall, cede victory to the Kachinas, and descend with my wilderness ethics intact, leaving those shining Methuselahs undisturbed in their high and hostile abode.

I'd always thought I would do the right thing when faced with the choice between their well-being and the bragging rights for bagging Arizona's second highest point, but until you are actually there, staring up at those fragile and vulnerable trees after something like 3,800 vertical feet of difficult climbing with only a few hundred more to go, well... you don't really know, do you? Summit fever can afflict the best of us, make us do things we wouldn't normally do.

I looked up at the great pyramid of stone above me, imagined what the view down into the Inner Basin would look like from the top, how the thin breeze blowing along the summit ridge would feel ... and I let it all slip away. I turned back. For their sake I would not walk upon the summit that day.

I had passed the test.

Eulogy for Unwanted Trees

Unwanted Trees, December 2011

Over the holiday break the forces of progress took the little patch of ponderosa trees behind the building where I work on NAU campus. A 45,000 square foot office building will be going up back there and, well, those trees had to go. But unlike another recent tree-cutting project on north campus, there was no effort made to save the trees, no facebook campaign, no twitter alerts, no "trees are people, too" posters, and no forums with the President attended by concerned employees and students that I am aware of. Instead there was only silence and a sense of crushing inevitability. A few of us grumbled and lamented the coming loss, but most greeted the news of the impending clear-cut with yawning indifference or were glad that there would soon be more office space on campus.

 

Unwanted Trees, September 2011

And so, with little forewarning on a day when the university was closed and most employees and students were away for the Christmas break, the contractors arrived. They were armed with a feller-buncher and a skidder and in less than two days' work the trees were gone, replaced by too much sky and a flat, brown plain of disturbed earth. Around the periphery of the plot the cutters spared a handful of the largest and oldest pines and a few clumps of younger trees, presumably to keep some semblance of a natural forest setting when the construction is complete.

 

Unwanted Trees, January 2012

I'm sure the University has very good reasons why we need another office building, why the last patch of undeveloped green on west campus was not worth preserving. No one asked them about the grand plan so they didn't bother telling, I guess. And after all, it's their land to do with as they please. But you know what? That reasoning is beginning to wear thin with me. Maybe I've spent too much time in bruised and burned wastelands these past couple of years, studied the aftermath of too much destruction and found too little hope in the ashes and the stubble, because I doubt they could've said anything that would've convinced me that those trees were less valuable than an office building. I think it's getting to be too late in the game to be cutting down healthy trees lightly, no matter who owns them or where they're growing.

 

Unwanted Trees, January 2012

And so this is my little eulogy, my little lament for those unwanted trees, the ones sacrificed for an office building. Before long the construction will be complete, a platoon of fast growing non-native scotch pines planted, and no one will remember that a little slice of forest survived there into the second decade of the 21st century. Even now, only days later, my memories of those trees are beginning to fade and take on the golden hues of the good old days.

Onwards and upwards.

The Advance Guard

 The Advance Guard, Schultz Pass, September 2011

When I hike I tend to keep an eye open for stuff that's different, stuff that doesn't quite fit, stuff that doesn't belong. It's a skill you can pick up and hone with practice. Mostly I just notice a lot of fifty-year-old tin cans hiding in the fescue or the discarded corners of PowerBar wrappers. But sometimes you can find really wonderful things too: abandoned and naturalized roads that haven't seen an automobile since the Eisenhower administration, gnarly old oak trees, pines porpoising up and down from below the ground like dolphins surfacing for air, agave gardens hidden up on ledges hundreds of feet in the air. All wonderful stuff.

While I was hiking the section of the Arizona Trail that passes through the Schultz Pass area the above Alligator juniper tree caught my eye. What piqued my interest in this particular tree wasn't so much that it's a juniper but that it was growing at an elevation of 8,100 feet and surrounded by miles of high elevation mixed conifer forest. This tree was growing by itself, but I saw a few others along the trail, most of which were much smaller and presumably a lot younger. 

Juniper trees are generally lower elevation trees, preferring warmer and drier locations such as the south facing slopes of Elden and the top of Anderson Mesa. They also tend to pal around with pinyon trees a lot, but not exclusively so. Schultz Pass doesn't seem to qualify as particularly good juniper habitat to me, as you can readily find ponderosa and all the usual high elevation suspects like southwestern white pine, white fir, aspen, and douglas fir growing close by. I'm sure that this tree's original seed was carried up the mountain by Clark's Nutcrackers or other birds and then dropped below the ponderosa that used to grow in that spot (see the stump to the left of the juniper's trunk.) Somehow it germinated and thirty or forty years later we have the tree in the above picture.

 

The Advance Guard, Schultz Pass, September 2011

On one hand I'm amazed at the perseverance of these trees and the fact that they are able to grow and thrive all by themselves away from the usual pinyon-juniper woodlands a thousand or more feet below. But on the other hand they are a little worrying as I think they could be the first signs of the massive changes that will be occurring in these mountains over the next century or so. I've read that as Climate Change begins to take hold the various life zones will shift higher and everything growing in them will try to follow along ahead of the warming climate. Even the relatively mild emissions scenarios -- those assuming that we'll get our collective acts together and greatly reduce carbon pollution -- predict plants and animals retreating hundreds of feet higher to stay in their respective life zones. The above trees could be an advance guard of sort, early pioneers presaging the main host of juniper that may be arriving in these parts sometime later in the century. I imagine that the earliest indications of such a migration would look very much like the above: strange outliers surviving and thriving in places where they don't seem to belong.

With that said, I must add that as with the Weather-vs-Climate argument it's just not possible to 100% definitively attribute a few weird juniper trees to creeping Climate Change. Forests are astonishingly mobile entities and tend to move around the landscape in response to localized events such as a forest fire, irruptive bird populations, or a few unusually wet or dry years. Even human-caused events like a timber sale opening up the forest canopy, road building, and cattle grazing can shift species around. So it's perfectly legitimate (and probably even advisable) to doubt that any one thing - like these outlier junipers in Schultz Pass - can be attributed to climate change. But still, if you can put together enough of these weird happenings, like SAD taking out 90%+ of the lower elevation aspen, the mass die-offs of pinyons in their ranges north of the Peaks, etc, I think you can make a case that something is going on.

I am not the only one to ponder over these odd juniper populations cropping up under the pine canopies. Gwendolyn Waring in her excellent book A Natural History of the Intermountain West wrote about them, too, although she doesn't go quite so far as to connect them to climate change. It's definitely an interesting phenomenon and I can't help but wonder if they're up to something.

Vignette in Charcoal

Three Forks after the Wallow Fire, August 2011

Two months after the Great Wallow Fire had finished its dreadful work the man pulled his old truck off the deserted gravel road and camped on the shore of a tiny island of unburned trees in the middle of a wide, flat valley. To the north and to the south tall ridges presented the stubble of limbless charred trees, the slopes below a stark black burn. The half-cremated remains of an old corral stood silently nearby, grizzled posts charred and leaning, bits of coiled wire and long lines of bent nails lying useless in the dirt where they’d fallen.

Before leaving the last outpost of civilization he’d stopped to ask for updates at a tiny besieged burg filled with realties and vacant storefronts, the whole lot surrounded by bastions of sodden sandbags and hay bales. At the small government office a girl in a green uniform, possessed of a frightful and manic cheeriness, had given him a computer printout map with roads and safe-zones outlined in yellow and red and brown. She’d delivered a polished, well-rehearsed pitch about how there were still green places to see, things looked worse than they really were, and on and on and etcetera and etcetera.

He’d nodded and smiled, watching her eyes, thinking all the while about the seared and blistered slopes of grand old Escudilla Mountain only a short distance away. When she’d finally run out of words the haunted look he’d seen flicker behind her smile betrayed the lie. He’d left that accursed place as quickly as he could, hurriedly topping off the truck’s gas tank before gunning the little engine into overdrive up the pass and into the bruised and busted mountains.

 

Closed Road, Wallow Fire burn area, August 2011

A light drizzle of rain began to fall as he pitched the tent, more mist than actual rain. The meal, cooked over a tiny jet of blue flame, tasted of ash and bestowed no cheer beyond mere sustenance. He was bone tired after having driven a thousand unpaved miles through the wasted land, occasionally waving with two fingers to grim-faced men in white and green pickups. Somehow, through an accident of timing and political pressure he’d become one of the first citizens to venture back into the newly reopened environmental catastrophe; the men in the pickups seemed both surprised and maybe a little resentful to see him there. He guessed that they’d grown accustomed to having the disaster zone to themselves, their own private little patch of Armageddon in which to play.

Every stream crossing and drainage had its own personally assigned road grader, eagerly anticipating the onslaught of mud, broken logs, and soupy ash that was inevitable at the next hard rain. After thinking through the implications of all that trembling machinery he’d found himself constantly checking the map and GPS on the passenger seat beside him, determined not to drive any road with less than two confirmed exits. To enter a blind alley in that place would surely invite disaster when the storms came.

Great decks of blackened trees lay discarded and rotting along the roadsides, every tree within striking distance of the road brutally felled away from the paths by crews of men with chainsaws and great, ugly machines that had crosshatched the embankments with their caterpillar tracks. It was an ugly and permanent sign of desperation, a “get the roads open at any cost” measure. That those managing this land had resorted to such a thing spoke volumes of the shadowy forces at work, of economic and political pressures jostling and shoving at one another. After seeing it firsthand he didn’t think any of this land should be opened to the public, the conditions still too dangerous, the landscape still too angry, too vengeful.

 

Approaching Storm, Wallow Fire burn area, August 2011

With the light failing and the clouds dropping ominously the man finished his meal, fetched a water bottle from his backpack, and climbed one of the nearby ridges. A thin line of surviving trees lined the bottom of the slope, their canopies a quilt of damaged green and deepening brown. Thick carpets of cinnamon needles blanketed the ground below their scorched trunks.

He climbed higher, the slope becoming a smooth grade of compacted gray and bits of muddy charcoal, exposed rocks poking at the thin skin of the mountain. When he reached the top, sweating hard in the humid air, he found himself in a roofless cathedral of anti-forest, the canopy burned away and replaced with black, hard edged silhouettes, the exposed rafters of the forest.

He crouched next to a spider’s web of white aspen roots lying naked upon the surface of the ground. The fat roots were singed in places and split open lengthwise, burst open like over-boiled hotdogs by the heat of the inferno that had consumed the mountain. Buried deep the tree’s roots should have survived the flames unscathed and by now there should be a burst of green atop the ridge, thousands of suckers extending in great twisting, chaotic, and wonderful circuit tracings along the slope. He saw none of that. Only a few forlorn sprouts here and there poked above what was left of the hydrophobic, sterile soil.

The man had hiked the same ridge the previous year during some poorly planned camping trip to photograph Fall aspen colors. It had been a crisp, late October afternoon with perfect yellowing sunlight angling in from the west. Old and twisted aspen stood atop the ridge then, heavily encroached upon by waves of spruce and fir and pine. The weight of the millennia had hung heavy and claustrophobic, the relict aspen trees’ presence denoting the true age of the forest, just how long it had been since any great disturbance had come calling there. He had paused for long minutes, soaking up the ambiance of the forest around him, listening to birds calling from the shining canopy above. He thought there might have been nuthatches, but he couldn’t remember for sure.

 

Cooked Aspen Roots, Wallow Fire burn area, August 2011

None of the pictures he’d taken of the trees on the ridge had come out. Every last one had been underexposed and dark, the golden aspen reduced to silhouettes and flat lifeless cutouts. Later, clicking through the photographs he’d dismissed it as a trick of poor composition and misconfigured camera settings. But now, crouched amid the destruction, he wasn’t so sure. Had the lens somehow punched through the thin veneer between what was and what was soon to be? Had the trees already begun to fade away, their life force dimming ahead of the impending catastrophe that was barreling down upon this land? Had he unknowingly stood among a gathering of ancient treeish ghosts, the last man to witness them before they’d slipped away into oblivion?

Somewhere off to the south the thunderstorm that had been lurking about all evening was finally beginning to build up a head of steam and a low, menacing growl of thunder worked its way up the valley. A gust of outflow wind blew through the dead trees overhead, a hostile, threatening hiss of a sound. Fat raindrops – the kind that mean business – began to explode around him like mortar shells. For the first time since arriving in the land of charcoal he felt the stirrings of real fear in his gut.

The end of the world was coming, gray and black and crackling with rage and lightning.

And then, with his throat tightening, the confidence he'd been tenuously clinging to abruptly snapped and he fled before the approaching storm.

A Fire Upon the Mountain

Managed wildfire creeping along the forest floor, July 2011

I pull off the darkened forest road and stop my truck in frustration, dust drifting ghostlike in front of my headlights. The rough directions given to me by the Forest Service, hastily copied from an e-mail earlier that afternoon, are clear yet make no sense at all from my dimly lit cab now that I'm actually in the field. Seemingly random turns through blackout tunnels of trees and moonless meadows have left me hopelessly turned around. Were it not for the decade-old forest map on the seat beside me -- too high a scale to be of much use even in the light of day --- I probably wouldn't even be sure I was still in the Coconino national forest.

This can't be right, I think, wishing I'd brought my gps.

Then I look up the hillside through the open side window and I see it: a dim orange glow reflected from rising smoke. Behind the black silhouettes of trees I can see a long line of flames flickering against the invisible mountainside. The acrid smell of burning assaults my nose, tightening my sinuses, and I know I have arrived. I kill the engine and sit for a moment behind the wheel.

Ostensibly I am here to take photos on a sort of lark, but in reality I'm seeking an endangered species, one rumored to exist in the wild yet seen by very few: Restorative natural wildfire burning in its native ponderosa habitat. For most of a century these creatures were mercilessly extirpated from the public lands, confused with their more destructive early-season human-caused brethren. Only relatively recently with the rise of more enlightened management policies have they begun to make a comeback, and even then only under tightly controlled circumstances. If you read the dry, carefully worded press releases filled with codewords like "managed wildfire" and "lightning sparked" and "hazardous fuels reduction" you can sometimes learn of their presence.

 

Burning Log, July 2011

I shoulder my pack and camera gear and set off up the hillside toward the flickering glow, picking my way carefully through the pitch black forest. As I draw closer to my quarry I turn off my headlamp and the washed-out two-dimensional LED projection the lamp confers is replaced by a gloriously three-dimensional firescape. My eyes adjust to the dimness and it becomes apparent that the fire is huge, stretching for many acres across the side of the mountain and extending far up the slope. Presumably the original lightning strike is somewhere up there high above, the source of the ten day old blaze.

Forgetting my camera I simply stand there in the darkness taking it all in. The wildfire is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen and I am enthralled by the calm, almost demure manner that it goes about its age-old work of clearing the forest floor. Like ice melting or water slowly seeping into cloth the fire is drawn into the fallen logs, to the dead trees, into the doghair thickets and the mats of pine needles. It is a fluid thing, practically a living, breathing animal, and it responds to the air currents and terrain in wondrous and fascinating ways.

For long minutes I stare spellbound, watching the flames creeping their way slowly down the slope, inches at a time, listening to the sound of crackling combustion and popping knots. Somewhere a large log catches fire, burns furiously, shoots sparks crazily into the air, then mellows and settles down into a bed of red coals. The nearby large ponderosa pines indifferently shrug off the tantrum, their bark hardly scorched at all.

 

Ponderosa Pines and Wildfire, July 2011

As I stand there sweating I realize that I am witnessing an unfolding drama as old as the ponderosa forest itself, one phase of a cycle that has been occurring since the very beginning. It is the delicate interplay between the slow buildup of fuels, winter snow and spring rains, summer lightning, the terrain, and the personalities of fire-adapted trees and vegetation. This fire is as much a natural part of the forest as the trees themselves, the rocks, the very mountain beneath my feet.

Hours later my camera's memory card is full and I have spent half the night wandering back and forth along the side of the mountain as if in a dream. Reluctantly I pack away the camera and tripod and head back down to my truck waiting far below. Ahead is a long drive through a maze of forest roads and then hopefully a few hours sleep before work. But I am too excited and know that sleep, if it comes at all, will be as elusive as these natural, restorative wildland fires have been for so long.

The Trouble with Trees

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.

In the Sea of Gambel Oak

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.

Making way for progress

Making Way for Progress, NAU Campus, May 2011

The university has been talking about building a new residence hall on east campus for some time and, well, it looks like they've finally made good on their threat. The first step, of course, was to get rid of all the pesky trees that had been squatting on the land for eighty or ninety years.

Denuded Hillside, NAU Campus, May 2011

Just last week I cut through the area on my way to the FUTS trail and everything seemed utterly normal for a mid-spring afternoon, as Northern Flickers were calling profusely and even a pair of Turkey Vultures had stopped for a rest in the trees growing near the cemetery fence. It was always kind of a sketchy area to walk through even during the daytime, what with homeless campsites and trash scattered about, but the birds seemed to like it.

Slash Pile, NAU Campus, May 2011

Today the area was unrecognizable as all the trees had been dismembered and stacked into a neat log deck, their limbs and roots dumped in a giant pile nearby. Even the climbing/challenge course was gone, the only remnants being some long lagbolts carefully segregated away from the rest of the slash, presumably to prevent them from finding their way onto a mill-bound truck where they might get up to mischief with the saws or chippers.

Log Deck, NAU Campus, May 2011

I knew this would happen eventually, and it's the university's land to do with as they please, but I guess I'd gotten used to that little patch of forest being there over the years. I wasn't expecting the end, predictable as it was for such a valuable parcel in the middle of town, to be so shocking, so utterly depressing. But such is the price of progress, I suppose. Onwards and upwards!

The Refugees

The other morning while hiking Mt. Elden I came upon a herd of perhaps fifteen mule deer hanging around the edge of the big thicket of Radio Fire aspen along the Sunset Trail. I'd never seen that many deer together in that area before; if there are any at all it's usually just one or two. As I approached they retreated into the aspen thicket, making a hell of a ruckus, sounding like a bulldozer crashing through the woody stems and downed logs.

Two of them stayed behind, a doe and her fawn. The doe froze, staring.

"Hello," I whispered to her. "What are you doing up here, girl? Why are there so many of you?"

Of course she didn't reply, but a tiny, almost imperceptible movement of her huge ears led me to turn my head. My gaze shifted left, and as if she'd spoken in clear, plain english I understood their predicament: Off to the north beyond the spine of Elden was the blackened, damaged slopes of Schultz and Doyle Peaks.

The Schultz Fire.

Their home had burned. They were refugees, forced to leave their former territory and forage for food in less hospitable, less forgiving areas, forced to compete with existing deer populations and in turn put pressure upon them as well.

Even now, months after the flames finally died, the effects of that blaze are still crashing into the ecosystems around it like great waves on a beach. Because of events set in motion by humans months ago these deer now find themselves playing the role of a variable in Nature's terrible, pragmatic calculus of supply and demand, of overpopulation and scarcity.

The doe broke our staring contest and fled for the safety of the aspen thicket. I couldn't help but wonder what would become of her and her fawn. I silently wished them luck.

Winter is coming to the high country.

Some Better Pictures of Tornado Damage off Highway 180

On the way back from hiking the Bear Jaw / Abineau Trails this morning I noticed more tornado damage near Kendrick Park and decided to take a closer look. From what I could tell the twisters crossed highway 180 south of the Nordic Center, swirled around in the woods for a while on the east side of the road (where I took the pictures yesterday), then crossed back to the west just before the Kendrick Park Watchable Wildlife Trail parking lot. After that they went off into the deep woods before presumably vanishing somewhere north of Horseshoe Hill. At least I didn't see any more damage beyond that.

Here's a picture of a large ponderosa pine on the eastern flank of Horseshoe Hill. It is snapped off like a toothpick, its top lying over fifty feet away beyond the left edge of the photo:

Here is another shot of some broken trees, also near Horseshoe Hill. The tops of these had blown across the forest road; presumably the Forest Service are the ones who bucked them up and shoved the rounds out of the way. There were woodcutters everywhere, so I guess it could've been one of them, too.

I then drove back down the highway and followed the trail of devastation into the forest. To my dismay I discovered that the tornado had skirted the edge of one of FoNAF's aspen exclosures. The winds had knocked down many pines, some  of them over the fence.

The ironic thing about the damage to this exclosure is that we had just repaired this section of fence last month! You can see one of the new wooden stays we installed in the above picture....