Life at the Top, part two.

For part one of this set of posts, click here.

I was looking through the blog and noticed that I never finished a look up into the amazing world of mountain summits.  Anyway, heading back above 11,500 feet above sea level, we find a world where life has not given up, but exists in a stunted state.  As noted in the prior post, alpine and/or boreal trees are pretty resilient things.  They continue to grow unabated, sheltered by one another, despite the increasingly hostile conditions, until at last they reach a breaking point.  Here, they either grow only on one side, facing out of the prevailing winds (as here), or grow extremely low to the ground in clumps called krummholz, literally German for "knee timber".  Here and much father north, in the actual tundra edge, one will find that the "moss" at one's feet is actually clumps of trees only as tall as a finger, if that.  Walking into the field is prohibited here, for the reason that careless steps might actually kill something that took centuries to get even this tall.

 In some instances elsewhere, one will find individual trees that do manage to gain some size to them, but instead of looking like normal trees, are twisted masses of mostly wood and few exposed needles.  This commonly happens to Limber pine, especially in the mountain heights above the Los Angeles and Cucamonga valleys (where it is normally the highest growing tree), and the famous Bristlecone pine.  Although both occur on the Front Range of the Rockies, they were mostly absent from this area in the national park, and most of the tree mats instead consisted of very tiny Englemann spruce and Subalpine fir, both of which form extensive forests of evergreen spires just below the tree line.  Such forests are very reminiscent of the Black spruce dominated Boreal forest that covers a good portion of Canada.

Tree balds, of course, can happen on much lower peaks, and elevation is but a sign that multiple factors for stunted growth are happening all at once because of sheer exposure.  Never ending wind, a short summer of two months with temperatures high enough to permit growth, intense ultraviolet radiation, and dozens of feet of snow cover all combine here into a cocktail of conditions inimical to the sustenance of most life.  Here, the treeline is the thus the limit for most growth; elsewhere, an empty summit might bear one of the conditions because of the particular location of peaks in storm tracks(such as Mt. Washington), isolated and exposed tops, and the altering effects of maritime and latitudinal proximity.  Here, however, is a land at the top of the world, with ground that welcomes clouds that have come all the way from the Pacific Ocean and will release what moisture they have left for the first and last time since precipitating on the Sierra Nevada and Coastal ranges.  These peaks, masses of rock more than two and half miles above sea level, are walls between deserts and grasslands, Paiutes and Arapahoes, and lands that trees and explorers never braved.  Here, ice still rules far into the summer.  If not for trail ridge road, even the hardiest of hikers would never spend much time up here.

 Yet even ice is not immortal and isolated from human impact.  Regardless of what one believes about climate change, the fact remains that glaciers even 14,000 feet up have started to disappear in recent decades.  Core samples drilled from these melting wonders imply that they have otherwise been stable for centuries, if not millenia.  These cores were drilled not by environmentalists, but by water authorities in nearby Denver and throughout the Colorado river compact, wondering just why snow melt from higher lands have not sustained their reservoirs when they did in the past, even under extreme droughts.  For the time being, the icy giants persist, and can still be seen and marveled at.

Water concerns and a changing world aside, the summit lands are still a place where nature and eternity trump human presence.  As is the case in much of the west, including the lower plains and deserts nearby, the land seems to go on forever.  Valley vistas are obscured, even on the clearest days, just from the sheer distance they lie away from the peak country.

Yet this is not a land of desolation, despite the seeming domination of ice, rock, and sky.  Even in this place of distant horizons and extremity of scale, the diminutive persistence of life endures in the spaces close to the ground.  In some cases, flowers start to bloom while they are still under an inch of snow.

 And of course, we too find a way to dwell in these lands, if only for a little while.  The alpine visitor center at Rocky Mountains National Park has to be one of the most exotic locations maintained by the NPS.  I might have spent more time there had my head not been feeling like an inflated balloon at the time.

Once I made it back below the treeline, however, I was golden.  Maybe I am just a man of the forest; as this was only a thousand feet lower:

That or I could be as tough as a spruce, I don't know.