Wednesday Filler: Where Warm California Meets Winter California

At around 6,000 feet above sea level in the Sierra Nevadas, the thickening oak forests and chaparral give way to coniferous forests, which in some places include Giant Sequoias (Sequoiadendron Giganteum).

General's Highway, Sequoia National Park.

The transition is sudden, and even though each forest merges into the other rather gracefully, in some places one just needs to turn a corner and see a completely different world around it.  Some elements of each ecosystem do continue on into the neighboring one, but the dominant life in both transforms the surroundings in an almost magical way.

Making Sense of the Whole

Thus far on American Voyages we have been from Atlantic to Pacific, down well into central Mexico, and up to the spruce wilderness of the Canadian Boreal forests.  While this is a good thing for people wanting to see environments and landscapes very different from their own, such a jumping around approach tends to get both the reader and the writer a bit lost.  At the same time, a strange image of a continental mosaic pops into mind, with a desert occupying on square, a forest the next, and then some huge lake after that.  In truth, our landscapes tend to merge together rather nicely, with some species of flora and fauna being found in places as seemingly different as the Ottawa Valley and the mountains of Oaxaca, and a species like Silver Maple (Acer Saccharinum) can be found growing next to either a boreal spruce or a subtropical palm tree.  That said, one will be hard pressed to fail to notice a difference between a cypress swamp in Mississippi and an open stretch of shortgrass prairie in Montana.  So, how about an overall picture?  I found an excellent mapping resource just last night at BONAP, the Biota of North America Project.

For now, they seem to be focused on the United States, but they intend to expand their mapping projects to Canada and (gasp!) Mexico.  They have absolutely wonderful maps when it comes to the art of documenting transitions between ecozones (known as tension zones), so let's take a look at two.

Map the first, Tension Zones Between North and South:

As you can see, the lines are not a continuous path from coast to coast, nor should they be.  Changes in scenery from Canada to Mexico and the Gulf tend to be dependent on elevation and proximity to the moderating effects of large bodies of water as much as latitude.  Where lines disappear, this is because there is a ton of overlap between existing regions, as is the case in eastern Oklahoma, where east meets west meets south meets northeast meets, etc. etc.  Some of the lines should make sense immediately:

South End of Lake Huron to northern Minnesota: Southern limit of Boreal species.  North of this line the eastern pines, spruces, and birches are common.

Central Kentucky to Tulsa, Oklahoma: A distinct edge of some of the interior South/subtropics.  South of this line, almost exactly in fact, you can find Baldcypress (Taxodium Distichum) and Water Tupelo (Nyssa Aquatica) as well as many other southern species.

Richmond, Virginia to Macon, Georgia: Another distinct edge of some of the coastal South/subtropics.  On the Atlantic side of this line, which roughly coincides with the "fall-line" on which the great cities of Richmond, Raleigh, and Columbia were built, you can find things like the southern pines, a good helping of broadleafed evergreens, and even some palms.

Also of note is that even though this is a latitude-oriented map, the lines bend significantly south when encountering mountain ranges, and the red gets really dense in those areas.  The sudden change in elevation can create conditions which contrast very sharply between mere miles, a contrast which is perhaps the sharpest in extreme southwestern Utah, where the Great Basin and its plentiful acres of sagebrush and junipers quickly give way to hot desert species, like Mesquites, Creosote (Larrea Tridentata) and Joshua Trees (Yucca Brevifolia), as well as the sudden appearance of cultivated palms.  Other good examples of sharp contrast include the Sierra Nevada range of California, where giant trees clash with lower elevation grasslands and deserts, as well as the southern Appalachians, where northern pines and spruces well south of their normal broad range grow in close proximity to southern pines and other trees.

Map number two shows us how Tension zones fall between east and west:

While it might seem obvious that lines would be drawn between the mountains, plains, and eastern forests, some of them might require a bit more explanation.

The line stretching from Manitoba to near Houston pretty much serves as an excellent line between east and west in general.  Though numerous guide books insist on dividing species at the base of the mountains (the line from Alberta to El Paso, Texas), the truth of the situation is that the open plains west of the tallgrass prairies are really a gateway to the west.  Yes, you can still find eastern species creeping out along the rivers, but the overall look and lack of water in the landscape is pretty effective at telling travelers that they have left behind the watered east.  The line to the west of this, the base of the Rockies, pretty much takes you away from the land of the maples and oaks and into the land of junipers, pines, and fun things like a diversity of cacti, yuccas, and more cottonwoods than you can handle.  The line to the east of this, from Minnesota to the Gulf, is pretty much the eastern boundary of open prairie, where the grass admits that it can allow the oaks and other trees to win the eternal struggle of dominance.  Again, these are not sharp lines.  Forests pretty much cover a ton of Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma.

The line from British Columbia to southern California indicates the sharpest contrast of all.  On the eastern side lies deserts and the mountain forests which mock them from above.  To the west of the line, which roughly coincides with the Pacific Crest along the Cascades and Sierras, is an entirely different world of temperate rainforests, chaparral, towering redwoods, sequoias, firs, and Sugar Pines (Pinus Lambertiana). You know, the land that people tripped over themselves to get to when heading to make a new life out west.

If the last sentence seemed significant at all, that's because it probably is.  Cultural differences on this continent have a lot to do with differences between climate and ecosystems.  The sorts of crops one could grow in each region definitely birthed cultural differences, especially between North and South or Midwest, Nearwest, and Northeast (Corn vs. Cotton).  An open range created a new sort of rough and ready culture of the high plains and intermountain west.  Ontario is roughly divisible between its northern and southern parts, or between Shield and Carolinian forests.  The desert lands of northern Mexico can seem like a different world from the tropics of Oaxaca and Veracruz.  Southern California decidedly is on another planet.  Sometimes the differences in land and people are sharp, even as they are often less clear.

Q and A Session Four

This Q and A session is dedicated to the concept of not taking your backyard for granted.  I was lucky to get three questions that worked well this way.

Q: Why so many posts about prairies and savannas?

A: Grasslands are the most common ecosystem across the entire continent.  They can be found in nearly every state, province, and territory of our three nations, albeit in different forms.  In pre-colonial times, they were far more extensive than in the present day, engaging neighboring ecosystems in a battle royale of wildfires, rains, and herd grazing patterns.  Grasslands are extremely resilient and adaptable ecosystems that define the wild nature of our continent on the whole: a fairly warm, windy place that is full of water and yet also remarkably dry.  They can handle the worst weather we get, including extremes in temperature and precipitation, and manage to survive.  Conversely, they are among the most productive and diverse lands on the entire planet, positively exploding with life and beauty with just a little bit of rain and warmth.  They can be found at the edge of deserts, in meadows high atop mountains, far north in the tundra or far south in the leeward slopes of tropical Mexico, in sandy expanses left behind from the last glaciers melting away over the Canadian Shield, amidst the pines and palmettos of Florida, in patches of "barrens" surrounding the great cities of New York and Philadelphia, in clearings amongst great forests, and of course, in the great central plains that stretch from Alberta to Coahuila.

What's more, in addition to being emblematic of the frontier and survivalist spirit of this continent, they defy simplification, and are often the most misunderstood ecosystems out there.  North American grasslands are often thought of like so:

When in fact they are often wonderful worlds bursting with life like:

In short, they are often far more than meets the eye.  On the whole, nature has so many wonderful surprises awaiting for those willing to take the time and explore it.  Our hectic world these days is so caught up in activity for the sake of self-benefit that we often overlook the concept of self-improvement, and definitely leave wonder and exploration out of the equation.  Quite literally, we cannot see the forest for the trees!  Grasslands are wonderful places where we are forced to pay attention to what is underfoot and seemingly invisible to the glancing eye in order to fully appreciate what they have to show us.  This was certainly true for my development in observing and understand ecosystems.  After I gave the Great Plains a chance, I never looked at a forest the same way again.

Speaking of that, to respond to the question on a more personal level, I had always wondered where the forest stopped and the prairie began.  When I was a kid hungry for travel with that dog-eared and bent atlas in my hands, I always envisioned everything from Regina to Dallas to be one giant flat expanse of lawn.  I could not help but imagine what the line between this lawn and the forest to the east looked like, and I pictured a dark, lush forest somewhere in Missouri that all of a sudden petered out into the endless prairie, a wall of tree meeting a sea of grass.  The search for this grand line of division, though largely dispelled when I started to read about the places in that atlas, has always been a bit in the back of my mind even recently.  Whenever I head out west, when driving through Iowa and Missouri, I always take in the scenery with even more intensity and detailed interest than I do elsewhere ecological transitions, or ecotones, occur, expecting to find that line one day.  I wanted to know where the forest turned into the plains which gave way to the mountains which became the desert which... you get the point.  Ecotones are fascinating worlds of connections between diverse areas, both because of the contrast between life zones they display, and because of the shared features between regions they represent.  This dovetails into the next question:

Q: What are some places you have not yet been to in North America that you would put on your "bucket list"?

A: That would make for a very interesting post, and I say that because there are so many places I would want to see before I give myself back to the soil.  I suppose here I can cheat and qualify that question with a specific direction: what places would I put on my list of places I am most ecologically curious about?  I would say that have to do with transitions, and finding more of my great wall of forests.  Specifically, I would give my right eye to see (or rather have seen) where the boreal forest transitions into the central grasslands.  Picture an arc stretching from Edmonton to Winnipeg and down towards Minneapolis.  The biologist-powers that be call this "Aspen Parkland", where the great forests of spruce, fir, poplars, birches, and pines dance and meet with the prairies.  I have always wondered what an outcropping of Canadian Shield granite looks like emerging from tallgrass.  Yep, I have very simple desires and plans in life, a man who wants to find a rock sticking out of a field.  I imagine very little of this landscape survives intact in the United States, and the best bet would be to find it in Canada in some of the national parks set aside to preserve such a landscape, but the remaining ecotones in Minnesota hold a particular fascination for me because they share many species in common with the lands next door in Michigan and Ontario that I love so much.  Algonquin meets the prairie, I can only imagine it!

I would also love to see the Black Hills, as they are the easternmost extension of the great western mountain forests, one of the few places where elements of eastern, western, and northern forests come together, stuck in the middle of hundreds of miles of the Great Plains.  Again, I like putting the puzzle together as much as seeing the finished map.

On the same general note:

Q: You seem to be passionate about much of the country (I assume this is referring to the United States specifically), finding something nice about everywhere.  Is there any place you could not live?  I mean, could you actually live in a desert or on the plains?

A: Probably somewhere in the Deep South, and not out of a cultural bias that leaves me with a raised eyebrow and open mouth whenever I encounter "rednecks" (but when it comes down to it, I find all sorts of people to be far more interesting than undesirable).  The Deep South is exotically lovely, what with magnolias, live oaks (Quercus Virginiana) and balcypresses (Taxodium Distichum) dripping in Spanish Moss, and palmettos making the most of the steamy landscape.  All the same, it is, well, a steamy landscape.  I don't do heat and humidity in combination very well.  I would imagine parts of Mississippi would be my least desirable place to live, owing to the conditions and the fact that anything resembling a mountain would be at least a half day drive away.  Then again, the flora is lovely, the music is great, and the river and Gulf are never far away.  As for the desert and plains, as per my response to the first question, they are not as desolate and devoid of life as they seem to be.  They also both tend to be close to mountains, so if I wanted to, I could easily get my fill of some pine forest for a bit.  I like both snow and palm trees, so the desert or the southern plains could work nicely, sure.  St. George, Utah comes to mind, as they have both.

Well, actually, this is Washington, Utah, but that is right next door.

It also helps to have friends there.  The western migration trend never really has stopped, it seems.  Anyway, I would probably be most at home in northern Ontario or western Quebec, which would be outside of the United States, but you get the picture.  That would be the heart part of my "home is where the heart is" even if I could adapt to any place fairly well.  Even if circumstances forced me to live in Jackson, Mississippi, I would hardly consider my life shot to hell, but would get a really powerful air conditioner as soon as possible, or at least a nice ceiling fan.  I would explore every nook and cranny of my new home and get to know its flowers, trees, history, and way of naming soft drinks rather well.  The Creator left us a nice world to live in, and the least I can do is come to know and appreciate it.

The Mojave Desert From the West

North America, for the most part, is a very dry continent.  While there are places such as south eastern Mexico, southern Florida, and the Pacific coast stretching from Alaska to northern California that do receive a regular abundance of precipitation, days can go by without a cloud passing overhead, and drought can affect much of the land.  In the west, extremely tall mountain ranges running from north to south catch any moisture that would manage to evaporate from the cool Pacific ocean, leaving a vast tract of desert from British Columbia all the way down to central Mexico on the leeward slopes.  The contrast between the land blessed by rain and starved of it is always rather dramatic.

Here we see the Mojave desert as viewed from the San Bernardino mountains.   The forested slopes sharply give way to the desert scrub of the lower elevations at around 4,500 feet above sea level.  The land can sometimes be so parched that high winds can throw around the sands in a veil of dust that can cut visibility to almost nothing.  Further north, in the Sierra Nevadas, the western slopes receive an abundance of snow which enables the growth of the mighty sequoia forests.

On the other side of these mountains?  The northern, and driest parts of the Mojave desert, including Death Valley, which receives less than 2 inches of rain per year.  The Mojave is framed by remarkable mountains to the west and east, and by two other deserts to the north and south.  Like the Great Plains, it keeps the different parts of North America from spreading into one another.  In this case, California remains isolated from the mountain forests of the interior west, one of the many reasons why the great trees of her mountains and coasts no longer exist beyond her fortunate lands.  While it does serve as gatekeeper, the Mojave also benefits from the biodiversity found on its edges, and like the Plains, is an interesting expanse to look out on. The open, seemingly barren lands, rather than deterring explorers, have thus long since invited them closer.

Surprising Landscapes

So, where is the landscape this picture portrays?  

Oklahoma! In fact, only twenty-five miles northeast of Oklahoma City, on I-44 heading towards Tulsa.  Oklahoma conjures up images of dusty plains and flat, nearly treeless landscapes, when the opposite is true for much of the state.  Not long after one enters Oklahoma from the Texas panhandle, for example, do trees start popping up everywhere.  That said, the land still has a very "western" feel to it, complete with rocky bluffs and "mid-grass" prairie, but the transition between east and west is a bit more compact down here.  

The south east corner, down where Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma have a meeting, even boasts a native population of shrub palms, Sabal Minor, along with baldcypress and other subtropical plants and trees.  In the southwestern corner, far removed from the Rockies or even the Ozarks, are the Wichita Mountains, rising from the plains.  Oklahoma is yet another example of how there are truly no "fly-over" states, and that something exciting exists even in one's seldom appreciated backyard.  

Where the Pines Meet the Desert, the Herd Rushes Through

The east gate of Zion National Park is perhaps one of the less dramatic entrances one can enter through to get access to the canyon.  Much of the landscape is low in relief in comparison to much of the inter-mountain west, and the vegetation consists largely of scrubby pines and things that can tolerate sandy, arid conditions.  Most people entering the park from the east pass by this seemingly unremarkable, almost typical scene of the Colorado Plateau while looking forward to the canyon, tunnel, and other sights beyond.  The truth is, transitional areas are often overlooked in favor of the areas they border.  After all, who wants to see a stunted tree on the edge of a desert, or slushy snow at the snowline on a mountain?  If you ask me, that is taking a "glass half-empty approach" to watching the world unfold around us.  Instead, try seeing a tree growing as tall as it can despite all the odds against it, or watch as the slushy snow feeds little streams that turn out to be the source of a mighty river.

So what do you think of this scene?

At first glance, there is nothing really remarkable about it.  The Ponderosa Pines in the background are hardly impressive, the sagebrush in the mid-ground is altogether too common, and the yucca up front is in flower, but otherwise is as common as the sagebrush.  Then again, things look a bit lush for having all that well-drained sand around, and while pines and desert scrub can appear together, they often do not.  Indeed, there are two different worlds converged into one here, the equivalent of being several hundred miles north and south of a respective mid-point at the same time.  Not ten miles southwest of here is the Mojave Desert, devoid of any sort of tree that claims more than twenty feet of sky, while a mere five miles to the northeast is a forest of pines,spruces, aspen, and flowing streams.  In the meeting places of these two worlds, such as in the space seen above, species co-exist in a marvelous natural garden that makes room for just about any plant one can find in North America, short what can be found in the most tropical and most northerly climes.

Most people wait for the fall to watch nature go through changes, but in places like southwestern Utah, they can do this around the year.  The environs of Zion National Park contain the frontiers of the Mojave Desert, the Great Basin, the Colorado Plateau, the Wasatch Mountains, and the geological diversity of rocks and minerals spanning millions of years of sequential development, all of Utah in miniature.  

Utah Highway 12

Scattered across the United States are roads recognized by the United States Department of Transportation as offering unique archaeological, cultural, historic, natural, recreational, and/or scenic features known as "National Scenic Byways".  While I maintain that the best way to experience the continent is on foot, these drives are certainly a decent way to get off of the beaten path and sample what lies away from the interstates.  In the case of Utah 12, one can experience most of the west has to offer in general, from deserts to forests to mountain meadows.  Many people start at the western terminus of the road at US 89, though in my opinion the best starting place is at the other end in Torrey, for reasons that will become obvious.

First of all, where is it?

Utah 12 may seem to be off the beaten path, but it is surrounded by a handful of national parks, monuments, forests, and includes a few smaller towns with services along its length.   Drivers can expect to see at least a few cars and pedestrians along the way, though there will be many places that are absolutely deserted and incredibly wild looking, despite the popularity.

Starting from Torrey, the landscape is fairly even, dry, and low.  The surrounding environment is very typical scenery of the neighboring Great Basin desert, despite being located on the Colorado Plateau and within the Colorado river watershed.  The relative height of the land (4,000 feet and higher) and residual precipitation and moisture from the nearby Wasatch mountains give it a noticeable contrast from the rest of the lower portions of the Colorado Plateau and Escalante desert.  This is a land of sagebrush and juniper shrubs.

The junipers increase in size and are joined by pinyons with the passing miles, until they become more tree-sized.  See here for a more detailed description of the Pinyon-Juniper woodland.  Eventually, these trees are overtaken by Ponderosa pines and the odd Lodgepole pine.

The views start to become more dramatic here, and pull outs are available for those who wish to gaze across the lower lands to the distant Henry mountains.  There were trails leading every which way up there, and the area seemed pretty sparsely occupied.  Here, as well as portions further down the road, are sections of Dixie National Forest, which is broken into four divisions that stretch across much of the southwestern quarter of Utah.

The pines begin to give way to spruces and aspens, which serve as indicators that the road is nearing its highest point.  The forests here were somewhat unexpected; the southern Wasatch seem so much lower and isolated from the rest of the Rockies that it can be easy to forget such "sky islands" exist.  They do, however, and the experience of driving from desert to sub-alpine forest is like taking a trip clear north to northern Alberta and Saskatchewan, where the forests are remarkably similar (though the Engelmann spruces and Subalpine fir are replaced by White spruce and Balsam fir, which look close enough like them).  If there were no grand views or interesting curves, Utah 12 could be a great drive just for being a sample of entire ecosystems.  

At the highest points of the road, elevations level off at 9,600 feet, and the exposure the land receives creates balds and meadows, over which distant horizons of contrasting desert can be seen.

In many obvious places along the way, a traveler can see first hand the root colonization reproduction habits of Quaking aspen.

Aspen are truly remarkable trees that can reproduce by root clones.  The Pando tree/colony of aspens not far north of this area are said to be close to 80,000 years in age, which, if true, means that the groves would have migrated with the glaciers during the last ice age.  The tree/colony is located in Fishlake National Forest, and unlike Methuselah, the oldest known individual tree, is not kept secret in location.  This is probably because Pando is simply too expansive to be easily violated; the trees in the picture above could very well be part of a branching of the clones tens of thousands of years ago, despite being over a hundred miles away and on a separate mountain body.  

The great thing about Utah 12 is that no one driving it, even avid followers of things tree, will likely even give a passing thought to how amazing aspen are, because these trees are but part of a huge buffet of wonders that have already opened up along the way.  Case in point, the road suddenly gets straight and becomes set on a gentle gradient that drops like a very long ramp.

Forests pass by, transitions from biome to biome can be easily seen, and the desert returns.  This time, however, it is very different from what was left behind to the north.

The road also becomes quite the adventure, with thousands of feet of nothing but air serving as the "shoulder".  The experience was so breathtaking that I did not think to take a picture at the most dramatic point, though this would probably do:

Why yes, that sign does indicate a 14% grade.  At this point, Utah 12 is literally paved on the spines of mountains.  "Watch your step" takes on a whole new meaning, and even if the heights were not enough, careless feet can run into other fun little surprises.

Mindful of cacti, cliffs, and careless footing, one can now rejoice knowing that things are only going to get more incredible from here on out.  The road now passes through Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, one of the nicest surprises in protected lands.  The breadth of land really is a staircase, if perhaps tilted on its side.  Starting from the top, one passes through age upon age of geological history that ends at the bottom of the Grand Canyon in Pre-Cambrian granite, a younger version of the rock that makes up the Canadian Shield.  Again, the miracle of that plays second fiddle to the views alone.

Travelers need not be kept in the dark, however, as one of the best visitor centers anywhere sits conveniently off the road in the town of Escalante, Utah.  The place had the most informed staff I have ever encountered from a government office, and were truly passionate about their land.  In the interest of education, the store there is subsidized by the Western National Parks Association, and nearly everything was at cost if not lower in price.

Now, if by some chance the desert would start to get monotonous, green fields and lush riverbanks pop up between here and Tropic, Utah.  As one approaches Bryce Canyon National Park, the forests re-appear, though not beyond the altitude of the pines.  Of course, they would probably not be on the mind either:

Bryce is a destination in an of itself (as if the rest of these mileposts were not), so that picture will suffice for now until a better post can cover the place.  Anyway, moving on from there, the land opens up into lovely prairie of green, rich grass that is dominated by Utah prairie dog colonies.  The poor creatures have not fared well, and despite being an endangered species, are considered more of a nuisance by local farmers.  Yes, there are farms around here, mainly down in the warmer desert elevations.  You know, where there is no reliable water source?  Ranches are understandable, but farms?

As the prairies and meadows are closed in by encroaching cliffs, one heads down into the final leg of the highway, known simply as Red Rock canyon.

The pines stand lovely against the red cliffs.  There are several rock tunnels one drives through to complete the tour of Utah 12.  Mind you, the roads beyond are no less exciting from here on out; US 89 continues south to the town of Orderville, Utah. On the way, despite the lower elevations, the land is lush, green, and heavily forested.  Mind the dirty windows!

At Orderville, US 89 branches off south to Arizona and a slew of destinations like the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, or west to the eastern approach of Zion canyon.

This approach leads down to the Mojave desert, which is bounded on neatly all sides by incredible transitions.  Zion in the afternoon, though, has to be the most amazing way to enter the land of the Joshua tree.  The road leading into Zion is no less amazing.  Elements of the Ponderosa pine forest, Escalante desert, and Mojave desert co-exist in a delightful combination of pine, sand, yuccas, shrubs, and boulders.  That particular leg of this great adventure, however, will wait for a more detailed post.  

The North is Near

North America is home to the world's farthest southern tundra, on the shores of Hudson Bay.  The flat, apparently barren shores share the same latitude with Edinburgh and Copenhagen, and even the great Siberian tundra lies at least a hundred or so miles north of this.  A combination of a large continental body with deep reaching salt water bodies serve to make nearly all of interior Canada a really cold place for a good portion of the year.  The United States largely escapes the reach of truly northern conditions, although in some places in the north eastern areas and around the Great Lakes, the great boreal forests reach south.  Michigan is where the struggling remnants of a colder forest persist the furthest south, namely in bogs covered in Tamarack and Paper birch.

Swamps can often extend the natural range of forest types and certain trees well beyond the natural limits of their range.  The waterlogged soil can be rich in nutrients, but is usually of marginal quality for many trees.  Pines, for instance, require well drained soils.  Hardwoods like maples, beeches, and oaks require drier conditions, or at least soil that is more on the moist, rather than drained or wet, sides.  As a result, trees of more distant regions can find a more suitable home in these marginal soils, sheltered or cooled more so by the conditions of a swamp.  Baldcypress, for example, grow as far north as Indiana along the Wabash river.  Black spruce can be seen far to the south of their normal limits in small bottomland areas of the Allegheny highlands near Corning, New York.

For the most part though, no one is going to confuse the outer reaches of Detroit with "the north" just because a few tamarack bogs are nestled in with the oaks and hickories.  Things become far more noticeable when such relics of a colder age become the norm across lower areas.

Black spruce, especially on the left in that second picture, are those "Christmas trees" that seem to be missing most of their body.  They are usually missing interior sections of their crown, with but a mass of new growth at the top serving as the only distant evidence that the tree is not dead.  Even close up, the branches bend to the ground and look sickly, hanging off the trunk.  For all their weak appearance, however, they are truly remarkable trees that can withstand arctic temperatures, sourly acidic soils, and will not break under the worst snowfalls.  They can grow in a miniature form even in permafrost, can root peat mats together and stabilize bogs, and can grow either in standing water or dry ground.  They are extremely adaptable, and grow in a range of conditions from the treeline in Alaska all the way down to the New York/Pennsylvania border.  They are marginalized in the temperate southern limits of their range, and are perhaps the best indication that one has arrived in northern lands when they are seen covering vast tracts instead of being shunned in shaded, acid bogs.

This would, of course, place "north" as such:

The nice thing about this proximity to a fair bit of the population in both Canada and the United States is that some rather undeveloped, vast stretches of land are close at hand to those living in some of the biggest cities of the world.  At the same time, warmer areas given life by the great humidity factory of the Gulf of Mexico are not even several hundred miles south of the northern line, and areas there and in between are among the most productive agricultural regions in the world.  North America is just that diverse and amazing!

The Great American Desert

Last post we ventured into the Midwest and your author made shocking claims as to what it should actually consist of.  Daring arguments were made as to what could consist of cultural and ecological boundaries of the region, arguments that left out portions of states that are normally considered parts of the Midwestern area.  In the same post, the Midwest was largely described as a region of certain values and open lands.  The historical record given related that many settled in those lands, but some thirsted for something more, for truly open country, and headed further and further west.

Imagine, if you will, a family or two heading past the tallgrass prairies and scattered woodlands into the sunset.  Imagine them cutting through some trees and shrubs somewhere in Kansas or Nebraska, expecting to find yet another open space with a line of trees in the distance.  Instead, they find this:

They had heard stories before, of course.  Government surveyors, French beaver hunters, even caravan merchants headed for the Mexican markets in Santa Fe had come and gone through the cities of St. Louis and Chicago for decades, telling tales of a vast, empty dry land that opened up beyond the sunset.  They heard stories about many things.  Now the reality of the stark open lands was set before them.  But almost immediately, as a traveler from these days will find, they would discover that the Great plains would end up being far more than just a thousand miles of flat barren sands.

They would find rolling hills.

They would find incredibly rich soils, plentiful rains, and hundreds of species of wildflowers which blanketed the ground.

They would even find places where the eastern forests would refuse to give in to lighter rains and frequent, sweeping fires.  They would find large open expanses where there was more sky than planet, where the wind would constantly howl, where the horizon would go on forever.

They would choose to stay in the "Great American Desert" while others would turn back to the eastern lands  and still others would follow the wagon ruts and rivers west to the lands of promise in Oregon and California.  For a brief time, things were peaceful.  Americans, both immigrants and those born in the lands further east, would herd animals, plow and plant what they could, and hunt the Buffalo that teemed throughout the rolling lands of grass.  They would live in peace with their neighbors, the Osage and Pawnee. They would build homes dug into the ground and roofed with turf (there were trees, but there were few of them and they were not of construction quality or size).  In Canada, they would move out onto these lands and even marry some of the Cree and Assiniboine people there.

Then in the lands of the south, men from further east would insist on ownership of the land.  They would run metal rails across it, they would kill all the Buffalo (sometimes for fun), they would let their herds eat through the grass so fast and often that it would not regrow, and they would find shiny metals in the ground that would cause human stampedes.  The Osage and Pawnee would die from diseases, and the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, and Crow would point fingers at the newcomers and one another. Much blood would be spilled.  In Canada, the descendants of the First Nations who married the French settlers and company men of the Hudson Bay company would perhaps see what had happened to their south and would rise up against the easterners before they could do the same to them.  Their leader would die for their struggle; their voice would echo far into the future.

The winds would carry these voices of the north and the south.  They would be so loud that no one would forget what had happened on these open expanses of grass.  Perhaps they have been heard, for few people would ever live in these lands again.  In many ways, the plains remain as they started.  They are still very much a land of frontier.  The buffalo are largely gone, Indians are a memory and the object of memorial battlefields rather than a presence, and barbed wire fences in different range lands.

Yet the grass still blows beneath a broad sky.

The land seems to go on forever.

The plains seem to retain a quality of the great unknown that they had two hundred years ago.  Many people dismiss them as something to quickly pass through, a stretch of land between the friendly trees and farms of the east and the grand vistas of the mountain west.  People insist they died of boredom!  Others call Oklahoma through Alberta the "fly-over" lands.

Then some people, like me, know they have truly made it to the west once they see those last trees grow shorter and shorter and cling to riverbanks.  Not that the trees out there are unimpressive, mind you.  Plains Cottonwoods and Green Ash can be quite the welcome site along rivers like the Platte and Canadian.

Yes indeed, such trees can be a welcome sight if the prairie becomes too monotonous.  Then again, very few of the crossings are.  Sure, I-70 has about 200 miles of pretty bland terrain in western Kansas, but most of the other routes follow river valleys, pass by volcanoes, and roll up and down with sweeping terrain.

And yes, in some places, you can stand literally in the middle of nowhere and see nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles.  Even then, though, you notice the small things.  The grass gets shorter.  The air gets drier.  You start seeing sagebrush everywhere, and tumbleweed blows across the road.  Shrubs get replaced by cacti.

And then, just when you thought you were going to reach the end of the world, where the ground dries up and you think for sure that nothing can be past that next hill but more endless plains...


You see this.

This then, is the point where you know you have not been going into endless wastelands, but you have been swallowed already by the immensity of the North American West.

This is why I did not include much of the plains in the Midwest, because they are truly part of the west.  The air is dry, the horizons are grand, and even the towns have more to do with silence and the war against a hectic pace of life then they do with being towns.  They stick up from the plains like small oases, little islands of trees, often with a church steeple in the middle, and broad dusty streets that still have tumbleweed flying across them in high winds.

Are you expecting a saloon fight to break out?  I sure was.  That is, until I realized that here are people who could care less about a good fight.  Or government.  Or how prosperous the downtown boutiques are.   Here, the most prominent features of town are the local eating/drinking establishment with the most cars outside (which depends on what is on the menu a given night) and the roundabout in the middle of town where sits the modest county hall and a statue to either a famous explorer or famous Indian.  You might see a statue of Truman in Independence or some army colonel in any given town in Illinois, but here you are more likely to find one of Black Kettle or Pierre DeSmet.  This is a land of farming immigrants, native peoples in love with the sheer immensity of the land rather than what can be grown from it, the descendants of French explorers and fur traders, Mexican and Texan ranchers, and homesteaders, even freed men looking for a new future.  This is where the western lands begin.