The Forest Will Not Quit

As hard as it is to believe, large areas of the Front Range in Colorado are still ablaze, even under winter low temperatures and heavy snow-pack.

http://www.coloradoconnection.com/news/story.aspx?id=853700#.UQsLdb88CSo

The forests there have been through really rough patches these past few years, with fire being only the end of problems which have started with drought and climate-pushed insects doing quite the number on the spruce-fir forests.  Still, the western montane forests are incredibly resilient and have to deal with "normal" conditions that make life difficult enough.  Extremely low normal winter temperatures, intense solar radiation, and next to nothing for soil in many locations mean that only the best of the best can even establish here, and they do it well, even when it seems to us that they are struggling miniatures:

Rocky Mountain National Park.  The insect ravaged forests are all those gray-brown patches on the opposite slopes.  You can see a few trees even up here near the treeline.

 

Natural Patterned Wallpaper

Seemingly endless fir and spruce from the Rockies in central Colorado.  See you tomorrow!

The Heat is On

100 degrees in places like Michigan, Ontario, and Wisconsin comes around now and then, but when it does, it tends to be an abnormal, rather than frequent, occurrence.  Thus far this summer, we have had a handful of such days, and they have been coupled with a distressing lack of rain.  Lawns are well past the point of surrender, but now creeks are also starting to run a bit dry and even some of the deeper local lakes are becoming more akin to bathwater than something refreshing.  This has come to us on top of a rather mild winter, with some days in January even sitting well into the 60's.  Furthermore, this is part of a trend of a see-saw of extremes that have visited the world in the past two decades.  Rather than enter a harsh debate about climate change, however, I think what is needed most here would be some refreshing pictures of cold things.

With the recently devastated Rockies in mind, let's head to happier times in Colorado, from a better winter a few years ago.  First we can see some snow!

Vail Pass, Colorado, May 2010.

 Lovely stuff at near 10,000 feet, which sadly, did not happen much if at all even at these altitudes this past winter.  The spires you see there are either Engelmann Spruce (Picea Engelmannii) or Subalpine Fir (Abies Lasiocarpa), and it can be hard to tell with such a heavy snowpack holding down the rising branches the spruces would normally carry.  The Rocky Mountain forests are truly lovely, a great example of how massed individual species can really add to the beauty of an expansive landscape.  While variety is the spice of life and biodiversity is a very good thing, there is nothing like seeing a forest of spires like this or in the boreal north, where these trees are replaced by Balsam Fir (Abies Balsamea) and Black Spruce (Picea Mariana).  I promised I would not go on about climate change, right?  Well the truth of the matter is that these forests are actually disappearing before our very eyes as things get too warm for them and conditions in which they would otherwise flourish are heading further north or upwards.  While forests might retreat, they also have to deal with an increase in wildfires and insect attacks that their colder environments used to help keep in check.  See that snowpack?  Even for May, it is a bit low.  Our colder years now are what were once average.  The heat is on, indeed.

I-70 Eastbound exiting the Eisenhower Tunnels, just to the east of the Continental Divide.  11,100 feet up high!

The Front Range from "Behind", Colorado's Western Slope

Colorado is not actually entirely mountainous, as many would suspect it to be.  Well over a third of the state consists of the High Plains, and the great snow-capped peaks of common imagination actually take up very little ground in the mountain regions.  The most dramatic part of the Colorado Rockies, the Front Range, takes all of  about two hours to get through from east to west, at least on modern expressways.

After traversing the prairies and becoming accustomed to the forests of Subalpine Fir (Abies Lasiocarpa) and Engelmann Spruce (Picea Engelmannii), the rear of the Front Range is reached, and while still mountainous and on average over 7,000 feet above sea level, the land takes on a drier note.  Pines replace the firs, yuccas and sagebrush start popping up, and the peaks generally lose their snow in April or early May, rather than keeping it sometimes well into August.  This is not say that the land is any less lovely, or that one feels as if one has left mountain country, however.  Take this viewpoint, of the broad expanse of Gore Canyon, off of a very fun stretch of Colorado highway 1.

In places, there are taller, isolated peaks.

For those wondering, the lack of forest at high elevations is due to excessive logging and grazing that has taken place in the last century.  Still, little can dampen the grandeur of the dramatic walls and ridges that the Front Range itself makes up, towering over the relatively lower high country of the western slopes, especially when taken as a backdrop to one of the many lakes which lie on the western side of the range.  Shadow Mountain lake and Lake Granby are both dammed up reservoirs of the Colorado river (the two lakes pictured below), which provide water to the cities along the corridor from Denver to Cheyenne.  These views can be seen off of US-34, south of the western entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park.

The water reaches the far side of the divide through tunnels that were drilled under thousands of feet of mountain.  There are, of course, natural lakes in the region as well, though they lie further off the beaten path.  Grand Lake, Colorado's deepest and largest natural lake, can almost be seen in the first photo behind the peninsula with the homes on it.  The range catches about 80% of the state's precipitation, and like the rest of the crest of the Rockies, it usually keeps eastern weather to the east and western weather to the west.  The eastern side is frequently starved for clouds, whereas the western side can conversely be under a full-blown storm of some sort.  Those pictures are very deceptive!

Crossing the Great Divide at Milner Pass

North America is broken up into three major drainage areas, wherein water flows to either the Atlantic, Pacific, or Arctic Oceans.  Mexico and the vast majority of the United States drains either to the Atlantic or Pacific bodies, whereas a very small part of the northern continental United States (Alaska is a different story) and much of Canada contains areas that flow to all three vast expanses of sea.  In Montana, one can actually stand on Triple Divide Peak and set one foot on ground that will have precipitation run down to all three oceans, which, if you ask me, is way more impressive than standing on four states at once.  Now, in some places, the divide is very apparent, and grand crests stand up that daunted travelers trying to make passage across the breadth of the continent.  Without the convenience of a vehicle, and even with one, the passage over the divide is pretty rough.  This picture was taken in May, close to the divide on I-70 in Colorado.

In other areas, the crest is shockingly low, even nearby where it might have been ridiculously high and seemingly impassable.  Passes certainly do exist in mountain ranges; North America would otherwise be very difficult to venture through, as the great north-south mountain ranges have long served as a boundary between both cultures and eco-regions, and even weather patterns.  South pass in Wyoming, for example, is a fairly level venture devoid of rugged mountain scenery that nearly every migrant took getting to destinations beyond the Rockies.  In some areas, though, the Great Divide and its pass comes as a surprise, and might be far lower than surrounding peaks, as it is here in Colorado:

This is Milner Pass, which is nearly three thousand feet lower than nearby peaks, and it runs northeast-southwest rather than the east-west one would expect from the divide being in the Rockies.  The second picture is of the eastern side of the pass, a little rocky maybe, but something that would not look too out of place in the Canadian Shield.  The western side, in the third picture, is a gentle slope with loads of pine, spruce, and fir on it, and only slopes up a mere 100 feet within the visual horizon.  So what, you might ask?  Well, this is how it looks in the surrounding area, not a mile away:

Milner Pass is very, very deceptive.  The pass lies within one of the most dramatic sections of mountain in the United States, and yet is fairly level, and nestled between ridges so neatly that it gives off the appearance of being from somewhere in north-eastern boreal Canada.  The actual rise between the watersheds was covered with ten feet of snow at the time I was there, but there was no mistaking how relatively demure it felt in the presence of otherwise dramatic scenery.  A simple rise of a few inches is all that separates water from flowing to oceans thousand of miles apart.  Take a look at this shot, viewing the pass a half mile away on the "Atlantic" side.  If it were not for the peaks in the distant background, one would hardly figure they were on the great spine of a continent.

Furthermore, Milner Pass lies within one of the source tributaries of the Colorado River, which not even 20 miles from its source is already carving out grandiose canyons and valleys.  Here, however, are some of the humble beginnings of the powerful torrent.  Passes are also known as gaps and saddles, but here we have a pass that would be better termed cradle.

Inspiration Went Downstream

Sometimes a single picture can say so much more than a long post.  

Here we have the Fall river, making a lovely meander through otherwise rugged territory in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park.  This view looks down 2,000 feet into the valley, and one can also see the Great Plains, 30 miles away, in between the peaks to the east.

Moose in the Mountains

Moose are very large animals.  The bulls, in fact, can weigh close to a solid ton if not more.  They are normally quite peaceful, but like any animal, can get a bit antsy around humans, especially humans that simply get too close to them.  This is probably because they have been hunted by us ever since we probably had our first face to face encounter.  They supposedly came with us across the Bering Land Bridge, and like two other icons of the north, the Great Northern Loon and the Grey Wolf, can be found both in Eurasia and North America.  As in the case of the Grey Wolves, however, their range has been very much reduced because of over hunting.  Here is where they can found these days, in brown, and where I think they might have been, in yellow:

No one really knows how far south they used to go in pre-colonial times.  Most petroglyphs in the west that survive were made at relatively low elevations (less than 6,000 feet) and thus out of the kind of cooler habitat that moose require, at least as far as the southern Rockies and Sierra ranges of Mexico go.  Like the wolves, they probably extended into New Mexico and possibly even into the Sierras of Mexico in isolated populations, as far south as the 28th parallel (at which point the mountains level off to less than 8,000 feet and drier conditions prevail).  Moose require cooler temperatures and aquatic vegetation to thrive, conditions that the northern Sierra Madre Occidental certainly has.  Just imagine it, forests of pines and fir with moose, grey wolves, jaguars, and parrots!  Anyway, back to the land of the present, and a bit to the north.

Moose currently range naturally down in the Wasatch mountains of central Utah, and have been (re)introduced into Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park.  Here is one lovely moose browsing in the meadows near the headwaters of the Colorado river.

Unfortunately, people were getting really close to it, and by people, I mean crowds of people who clogged the road to see it.  The moose was visibly nervous and made a few snorts, bared its teeth, and bluff charged about three times.

I was standing next to a woman who had her lower jaw pretty much unhinged at the sight of a real, wild moose.  I mentioned to her that the people who were only twenty feet away from the thing were being stupid and pushing their luck.  I made my way back to the car, only to find her then delicately skipping towards the animal, and apparently just to snap some pictures.  I don't know about you, but I think I got some decent shots from much farther away.  Amazing what a camera zoom can do!

A moose sighting in the Colorado Rockies is a wonderful reminder of what a diverse continent we really have.

The Fountain Formation

The Fountain Formation is one of the first masses of rock and earth that thrusts up above the high plains in Colorado.  While the Dakota Hogback actually lies further east and is thus the first part of the Rockies that meets the dawn, the Fountain Formation is much higher and more dramatic.

Seen here from Boulder, Colorado, the Flatirons are certainly evidence enough of that.

The eastern fringe of the Rockies are often obscured by the grand spectacle of the Front Range, but are definitely an interesting place to explore.  In past posts I have considered the high plains to be the true beginning of the great North American western lands.  The eastern rising of the Rockies would definitely be the confirmation.  The land thrusts up, the grass and sagebrush give way to all sorts of trees and streams and rivers.  The sky remains broad from behind, and competes with the planet ahead.  The experience is a wonderful marriage of plains and mountains.

Lovely!  If only I could have seen a bighorn sheep.  They tend to range no further east than this, except up in the Black Hills.  Of course, that is, if they even exist.  I tend to think of them as being kin to jackalopes and unicorns, but I supposedly have been looking in the wrong places.

A Tiny River

Sick as a dog here yet today, but still trying to live up to promises of a post every other day.  How about just a picture for now, of the small Colorado river just miles downstream of where it begins its journey.  A lovely mountain meadow, and a friend.

Sadly, those grey forests you see on the far slopes are decaying.  No one entirely knows why, but field biologists working for the USDA are saying that insects that were once contained at lower elevations because of temperatures being inhospitable higher up are now migrating to higher elevations and attacking the spruces and firs that do not have adequate defenses for themselves.  Even then, beetle metabolisms have shot through the roof, and they are attacking immature and mature healthy trees rather than seedlings or old and diseased specimens.  Things change in nature, things die, but it sure is a sad sight to see entire ecosystems take a bullet like this.

If you have a chance to get to the Rockies, by all means, do it now.  Things might look very different even 10 years down the line.

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.

Life at the Top, part one.

The journeys in this blog have thus far introduced the reader to a variety of topics from mountains to deserts to upstart beavers.  Much encouragement has been made on the part of your author to explore the world around you, and this has taken us from Virginia clear across to California thus far.  Much attention has been placed on mountains.  Why is that?  Well, mountains are nothing if not majestic, and they are a wonderful way to see a great diversity of landscapes all rolled into one.  Take the Los Angeles area, for instance.  You can move from grasslands and oak forest, through pines and spruces, over rocky fields and alpine meadows and finally end up in desert in the space of 10 miles.  Elevation can be much less pronounced, however, and have just as much influence with changes as subtle as only a few inches, as is the case at places like Big Thicket National Preserve and the Everglades.  At Big Thicket, a foot of elevation gain can move you from a cypress swamp into a palmetto forest en route to a pine barrens.  I hope to tour the area personally next year, and give us some great pictures in the process.

What happens when you really gain the elevation though?  What happens when you pass through pines, spruces, and then notice that not only is the air getting a bit frostier, breathing is getting a bit rougher and that sun just seems to beat down more than it ever did during that time you fell asleep on the beach and woke up red as a tomato and embracing a beached whale for some reason?  Well, depending on where you are, you might see a distinct lack of vegetation and life in general, at least at first glance.

For frame of reference, the pictures used here are going to be largely from the Front Range of the Rockies, and then in Rocky Mountain National Park.  That particular shot was taken off of Trail Ridge road which runs through the park and climbs as high as 12, 183 feet up into the wild blue skies.  The road is perfectly fine to drive on, at least from late May until early October, but the experience is not for the faint of heart.  Most people will have something happen to their bodies once they pass 8,000 feet, and much beyond 11,500 (which also happens to be the tree-line), things can get a bit bumpy.  The tree-line is my limit for normal functioning.  Above the line, I experienced a slightly light head and reduced reaction time, while my heart rate remained normal.  I saw other people on this delightful glacier (yes, you can walk on it) hopping and skipping about without problems, but then I have also been in the car about 2,000 feet lower on I-70 with a friend who nearly passed out from just sitting and breathing as normal.

This is a land of extremes, and seemingly very remote.  No one can really live this far up unless they are much closer to the tropics (La Paz, Bolivia is about 12,000 feet up and boasts streets lined with palm trees), and even the trees give way.  As you can see, those spruces are either dead or growing on the side of their trunks away from the cold and wind.  Most of them are barely 12 feet tall, and are true champions of their species.  Twenty feet further up, they shrink into mats of vegetation huddled low to the ground.  You can see those here.  Those are trees, believe it or not.  They are just very small, because the growing season is maybe a month or two months long.  And yes, that is an elk.  Heaven knows what it is grazing on.

Twenty feet further down are healthier fellows, but they are far less impressive considering as how they are literally protected by themselves.  The winds drop inside any forest, and the canopy, even as open as it is here, can keep snow from melting into June or shrubs from defoliating into November.  Still, this is a world more than two miles above the sea, and a cold one at that.  Even where the forest does pick up a bit more mass, things are hardly ideal for growing.

Now I don't know about you, but those are some pretty amazing trees to be doing that.  Sure, the gap in the snow is artificial, as the road is plowed.  Truth be told though, I stuck my hand in there, and my arm went all the way in before I felt anything resembling ground.  That spruce is mostly trunk!  I have no idea how it managed to grow the way it did, as up this far, things grow very slowly (decades for a foot of length).  This is what the top of our continent looks like, and not only here.  Remember how I advertised mountains as the land of diversity?  Well, this land of the tree-line and higher is called the "Hudsonian" life zone.  It is named after the southernmost tundra in the world, that which rings Hudson Bay.  Species here can be found there as well, and a trip up the mountain gives you the habitat equivalent of driving from Omaha to Churchill, Manitoba.  There, and here, even in the most undesirable of conditions, life grows as soon as the sun can hit it.

Mind you, there was still a pretty heavy snow pack.

These pictures were all taken in mid-June, by the way.  

There is more on the way.  This seemed like an interesting place to stop for now.