Delirious Ramblings

Juniper and Aspen

Juniper and Aspen, Kachina Peaks Wilderness, April 2012

Now that's something you don't see every day: Juniper and aspen growing together - literally. Note how the aspen sucker is coming up through and around the young juniper.

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.

Trees in the Key of LED

Weeks ago I heard a rumor that in the city to the south there was a place where for ten dollars you can watch binary trees flicker and glow in all the moods of heatless neon. It seemed an obvious falsehood, the demented whisperings of television journalists and late-night commercials. Glowing trees! Puuuleeaase! But still, such talk often contains a kernel of truth so like tardy magi we undertook a post-Christmas journey to see for ourselves.

 

Trees in the Key of LED, December 2011

When we arrived at the Mecca of light we discovered that others had also made the pilgrimage and that just a hundred feet from the gates they’d created a kind of purgatory for themselves. We waited an eternity in lines of lines and queues of queues, shuffling our feet and muttering dark oaths and incantations under our breath. When at last we reached the gatekeeper we swapped hard cash for printed tickets and were ushered inside where all the rumors were proven true and more.

 

Trees in the Key of LED, December 2011

Inside were the great wondrous trees of fever dreams and James Cameron movies, their trunks and limbs sheathed in shimmering digital radiance and coursing with kilowatts of unseen power. Vast networks of chaotic branches arched high overhead, outlined in red and green and blue light. As I stood rapt beneath them they flickered and danced and sang the song of the body electric against the starless night sky.

Jesus H. Christ, imagine the electric bill, I thought.

 

Trees in the Key of LED, December 2011

At the feet of the great scintillated trees a crazy carnival of vendors sprouted like mushrooms. The pungent odor of movie theater popcorn and cotton candy mixed with the earthy smell of elephant dung. Children ran and swarmed like flies, wildly waving glowing lightsabers above their heads. Bored camels waited in a pen, slowly shifting their weight from one side to the other while parents opened their wallets and wriggling kids were hoisted up on their tall humped backs.

Many years ago on the other side of the world I'd watched similar camels dash across a lonely desert highway, their brown bulks floating weightless across the sand, barely touching the ground. Men dressed in robes and checkered keffiyehs had run after them, playing at a sort of tag that had been going on since time immemorial. My companion and I waved at them, but the desert tribesmen didn't trust our uniforms or our M-16 rifles or our odd ideologies and simply ran faster, prompting the camels to race ahead even farther.

I looked at the camels in their glowing fluorescent corral and wondered if they remembered the desert - their desert. When the last visitors were gone and the lights finally turned out, did the electric camels dream of sand and open vistas of shimmering heat?

 

Trees in the Key of LED, December 2011

When we’d circumnavigated the Lite-Brite world and found ourselves back at the beginning I noticed the waxing crescent moon floating overhead. It hung there in the blackness heavy and grinning with meaning. Whoever had placed it there had precisely matched it to the real lunar cycle, even positioned it so it would be visible in the western sky where the real moon would be setting this late December. Perhaps it was only a random coincidence, the workings of pure chance, but in that alignment I thought I smelled the logic of purpose.

 

Waxing Crescent Moon, December 2011

Around us the children laughed and adults snapped final blurry pictures with their camera phones and remarked at how beautiful the lights had been. Beyond the facade of high technology luminescence and carny commercialism the extravaganza of LED trees had perhaps tickled some lost genetic memory: we knew the glowing trees were beautiful and to be appreciated, that the lights were important, that there was something special and powerful going on in that place. I suspect few (if any) of us understood exactly what.

 

Trees in the Key of LED, December 2011

As we left I wondered what an eighteenth century Navajo medicine man would've thought of the flickering trees and their high-tech spectacle. Would he have marvelled at them as we did? Would he have feared them and their digital song of electricity? Or would he have simply shrugged and said that trees always glowed like that and that we were blind to think otherwise?

Busted Aspen

Busted Aspen, Fremont Peak, December 2011

The past few winters have not been kind to the aspen growing at the upper limits of the aspen band on the San Francisco Peaks. Heavy snow and ice combined with high winds have seriously damaged many of the mature trees, leaving busted and broken trunks standing against the sky like telephone poles. In many places impossible deadfalls of shattered trees block all passage, forcing backcountry travelers to retreat around them to find another route.

I'm not sure what to make of this. On one hand I'm tempted to think it's related to climate change because as the climate warms storms are predicted to become more intense. And we've certainly had some very powerful snow and wind events the past few years. It makes sense that those trees growing at the limits of the species' range would see the first tangible effects. But on the other hand this damage may simply be a sign that these aspen have grown old and large enough to be vulnerable to storm damage. Perhaps this is an entirely normal thing. In any case it's a helluva thing to see.

Gambel Oak Acorns

Gambel Oak Acorns, Mount Elden, September 2011

This morning I noticed that the Gambel Oak growing on the eastern slopes of Mount Elden were beginning to produce acorns so I stopped to take a few pictures before heading over to the Lookout. Apparently the acorns are edible, but you have to remove the tannic acid from them first, otherwise they're too bitter to eat - and probably mildly toxic. Thirty seconds of googling didn't turn up any recipes or methods for getting the tannins out so I guess I'll forgo experimenting with them.

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.

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.

Bristlecone Pines at Doyle Saddle

 

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.

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.

Here There Be Giants

Giant Aspen Tree, San Francisco Peaks, May 2011

I spent most of Memorial Day exploring around the west side of the Peaks, hiking some big miles on the Arizona Trail and testing out my new gps unit in the dense tree cover up there. To my delight I found some more giant aspen trees, even bigger than the ones I found in Reese Canyon last year. The giant aspen in the above picture was roughly 40" in diameter - well over three feet! It's probably not a record holder in the size or age department, but still a very old and very large aspen for the Coconino.

There was another tree down the hill that looked to be a little larger than the first, but it had a rather unfriendly bush growing right at its base so I didn't measure it. The perspective of the photo makes it look small, but take my word for it: It was quite thick, although not particularly tall.

 

Giant Aspen Tree, San Francisco Peaks, May 2011

It was interesting to note that most of the really big trees had suffered some kind of major damage, as in their upper trunks had been broken off in some long ago windstorm or they had only a few branches left. They were also almost all solitary trees with few close neighbors, and growing in relatively moist places with good drainage. The ones in Reese Canyon were the same, come to think of it. I would guess that these really big trees are able to survive so long and grow so large because of the steady availability of water. Other aspens coping with less reliable water sources wouldn't be able to keep growing long enough to reach these dimensions.

Although, when you stop and think about it, being clonal organisms this "old" and "young" business doesn't really apply to them the same way as it does to you and I. What I mean by that is that most of the aspen clone is underground, is likely several millennia old (or more), and the older stems are probably directly connected to the younger ones through a communal root system, thus sharing nutrients with each other. The trees we see aboveground are just one part of a large and persistent organism. Labeling this part "old" and another part "young" is nonsensical, kind of like calling someone's elbow or their hair "old."

 

Giant Aspen Tree, San Francisco Peaks, May 2011

The above tree wasn't as big as the others, but it did have a nice symmetrical shape to it. I would gather that unless insects or a fire gets it (unlikely in that location) it will probably live to be a grand old giant as well.

There are many aspen groves growing along and on the western flanks of Humphreys Peak in a mosaic of sorts, some of them very large and encompassing acres and acres. As you climb farther upslope from Hart Prairie into the Kachina Peaks Wilderness and walk along the contours of the mountain you pass into some really dense, old-growth stands. These are truly wild trees, their bark creamy white and unmarred by the sting of a carving knife. Perhaps there are other giant trees growing up there, nestled cozily in sunny and moist drainages where they may have gone undiscovered.