North America's Rocky and Piney Forests

Yesterday's post was about California Redbuds in their natural setting, the lower elevations of the western slope of the Sierra Nevada.  Part of the commentary included a remark on how relatively lush broadleaved forests, deciduous and evergreen both, are relatively rare and tend to stand out in contrast with the rest of the arid, rocky west that tends to be dominated by conifers.  While there are notable exceptions outside of the wetter parts of the west coast of the continent on the western slopes of the coastal ranges and the Cascade-Sierra chains, much of the low and middle elevation (the higher elevations tend to be a bit more wet and full of spruces and firs and take on a different atmosphere altogether) forests and woodlands are relatively open pine forests.  In some areas, such as here on the slopes of Mt. San Jacinto, rocks, pines, and a bit of open sky are what one will tend to find in the way of forests.

In others, the canopy does tend to get a bit more compact, such as here in central Utah.

This sort of forest can also be found in eastern North America, particularly on the Canadian Shield where Jack and Eastern White Pines manage to creep into any available hole in the rock and form soil pockets over the centuries together with the lichens and mosses.

Found at  Global Forest Watch Canada, an excellent site on the life of Canadian forests!  This picture was taken at Killarney Provincial Park, one of the loveliest parts of Ontario.  

This sort of soil formation is a very primal process.  One tends to think of soil merely as fertile dirt, but the truth of the matter is that it is broken up rocks and minerals often rich in organic materials of ages of decayed plant life and bacteria that pretty much make soil a place to live.  In essence, when we see these forests, we are looking at a plant succession process that often takes place over a very, very long time.  We are often fortunate to have some of them intact, if not entirely virgin, because the terrain engendered difficulties on the part of those seeking to extract the natural resources found there.  At the same time as these "last forests" were being considered for the saw and plow, in fact, the conservationist movement was heating up and usually targeted such areas for preservation as the Sierras, the Rocky Mountains, and parts of the Appalachians, Laurentians, and Algonquins, to be later joined by efforts down in Mexico's Sierra Madres.  The great rocky forests of California and Ontario were the first to be saved back in the 1890's.  Perhaps we got so emotional over such landscapes not because they were still relatively untouched by the hand of humans, but because they have a look and feel of something remote and almost savage, places where we explore and play but have difficulty setting land to the plow or settling down.  Heck, the forest really has to work overtime here just to raise the canopy!