Wednesday Filler: Life Outside (and Inside) a National Park

Would that the many parks and preserves in North America stand as the crowning parts of their representative habitat rather than islands among development or commercially exploited lands.  Many if not most are islands, and sometimes within themselves as well.  Death Valley National Park, for instance, is often captured in popular memory as a hot, dry, unforgiving bare bones desert, when in fact it features pine forests, waterfalls, and snow capped mountains.  Saguaro National Park brings us images of pristine desert scenes, when in fact it is being encroached upon by Tucson, and a quick step on either side of the park road gate brings one into an entirely different world of cactus or concrete forest.

So it is with Sequoia National Park, where the big trees are hardly the only feature even in the park itself.  Much of the lower elevations of the park are wonderful reaches of the California chaparral world, while other parts are dry open oak forests with yuccas abounding.  While not the big trees that inspire awe and amazement, these environments are worthy of exploration and a reminder that while the purpose of a park is to preserve and allow everyone to enjoy our national treasures, a park also exists to remind us that the world outside its boundaries, while not protected, is every bit as amazing and worthy of more than a second thought.

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.

The Range of Lights

John Muir often called the Sierra Nevadas the "Range of Lights" because of how inspired he felt by the place, and by how the sun, at any time of day, would reflect off the granite in such lovely ways.

Looking north from California 41 in Yosemite National Park.  The bare trees on the ridge are left over from a forest fire that happened in the last decade, and the area to the right of this image was completely burned out.

The Sierras do feel different from the rest of California.  I have yet to make it to the southern Cascades around Mt. Shasta, which both Muir and Roosevelt said have no equal in terms of striking beauty, but something about the pines and firs rising from the granite made the mountains feel at once both exotic and familiar.  In any event, the rock sure was glowing.  That haze you see is not humidity, which I think does not exist in California anyway, but rather just an abundance of glow from every which way.

The scene you see above might have looked very different had it not been for the early conservation movement.  The trees would all be gone, the valley flooded, and the land strip-mined beyond recognition.  Thankfully, we instead have this beautiful view, the forest to actually protect water interests despite the absence of a reservoir, and a tourist industry to sustain the local economy well beyond what the meager production of gold would have meant.  The Sierras host many international travelers each year, often in greater number than domestic visitors.  Those who do come here often return home with stories of beauty and inspiration, perhaps not too far off from the tales once told generations ago about an unbroken land that served as the symbol and fitting setting of a growing nation still optimistic about a future by and for the people.

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!

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.