Two Common Northeastern Trees

As I was out saving the savanna today, I was approached by a kindly woman who knew pretty much everything about flowers, insects, and birds, but was completely stumped as to what was what regarding trees.  I think everyone should be familiar with the trees in their neighborhood, mainly because it tends to help one notice the natural surroundings a bit better by knowing what one is mowing/driving/walking past all the time.  If you think about the names of trees, you might start paying attention to everything else that manages to get along without our intervention, which is a good thing.

There sure are a lot of trees around, though.  Where do we even begin?

Well, it depends on where you live.  Say you are from the upper Midwest, Nearwest, northeastern United States or eastern Canada; you have probably noticed that most of the trees shed their leaves come winter time.  Some don't, and I say those are an excellent place to start, because they tend to stand out a bit more.

Somewhere near Lake Ann, Michigan.

Here we have, in the right center, an Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus).  It is the tree that is taller than any of the other ones around it, and has sweeping, soft branches of foliage that each grow in a unique way and yet still manage to present a form of symmetry and balance.  Even outside of their range in our broadly defined "northeastern" region, they tend to get planted because they can easily grow in a variety of settings and are absolutely beautiful.  This means that if you live anywhere from even as far away as northern Georgia to Manitoba, you have seen at least one in your lifetime.  They used to dominate landscapes throughout the region, growing as tall as over 200 feet up into the sky, dwarfing the rest of the forest.  Fossil records and remnant populations of this tree can be found as far away as central Mexico and parts of Florida!  They were once thought in-exhaustible because there were so many around, and they thus became the first sacrificial lamb of the North American lumber onslaught.  They formed the backbone of the Canadian economy as it transitioned away from a partnership with Britain in lieu of closer ties with the United States, which was hungry for more lumber in the post-Civil War period.  They have rebounded somewhat, but nowhere near to the extent they once existed in.  They remain economically important in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ontario, Quebec, and Maine, where they are still harvested under new timber management plans to better sustain the forests.  They are the arboreal symbol of Michigan, Maine, and Ontario.

Off to the left in the open, and hidden in trees both to the right of the White Pine and further into the background, we have the Red Pine (Pinus Resinosa).  They do not grow as tall as the White Pines, topping out at about 120 feet under perfect growing conditions. They can be identified by more open clusters of foliage that form globe-like shapes on more tightly packed branches.  This one can be a bit more confusing, as they tend to look like other pines when small, and even when tall, can look like mature pines from other regions, especially in the southeast.  Fortunately, they only grow in the northeast, and are not cultivated as far outside their range as the White Pine is.  They can handle a ton of exposure though, and are often seen growing out of rocks, on dunes, and thus are commonly used in shelter belts and windbreaks.  They were also valuable timber trees, but owing to their sap being a bit more frustrating to deal with, had and continue to be harvested slightly less than their more graceful cousins.  They are the celebrated state tree of Minnesota, where they attain sizes only surpassed in grandeur by the populations in Ontario.

If you start to see them growing in the midst of forests, you can be pretty sure that you have traveled far enough north or to a high enough altitude to be getting into the beginnings of the boreal forest.  

Next up: Two Common Western Trees.

An Emerging Bog

Bogs are wetlands that are in the process of becoming land, albeit spongy, very moist land.  They are one of the features we share with Eurasia, albeit with different plant communities.  They cover vast stretches of Canada and a little bit of the lower 48 states, and are very much emblematic of the "North".  Even where the trees give in to cold winter temperatures, bogs persist, without which the tundra would pretty much be a cold desert.  As much as they are a largely northern affair, most likely owing to the vast amounts of wet ground left over by both the last glaciation and lower temperatures conspiring with low solar radiation to reduce evaporation to a minimum, they do extend south into temperate lands, most notably in Ohio and parts of the Appalachians.  One notable example exists in southern central Michigan, Black Spruce Bog National Natural Landmark, which is surrounded by far more typical temperate deciduous forests.

Likewise, they can be found extending into the Rockies as far south as northern New Mexico, albeit as very unique and contained habitats in lands that otherwise tend to be more known for their aridity and sunny weather, even at higher altitudes.  The bogs there also have plant life more typical of their mountain landscapes, with, for instance, Subalpine Fir (Abies Lasiocarpa) forming the familiar spires at the edge of the bogs rather than the Black Spruce (Picea Mariana) which dominate the scenery in the boreal bogs.

So what's in a bog?  Biomass that replaces open water, essentially.

A mixed-spruce bog that has been slowly overtaking an enclosed bay of Cedar Lake, in Algonquin Provincial Park.  Records indicate that this part of the lake was already slowly turning into a marsh and bog, even though the section of water has been blocked off by the bed of the former Trans-Canadian Canadian National rail line since 1917.  

Here we see a lovely example of a spruce bog,  with some marshy open water gradually being replaced by peat moss, or sphagnum.  Further away from the water's edge, we see a truly remarkable shrub rising from the acidic, nitrogen deficient peat, the Speckled Alder (Alnus Incana).  This alder actually helps introduce nitrogen into the peat and emerging soils by means of special nitrogen fixing nodules down with its root system.  Slightly further in, we start getting trees, with a very hardly noticeable tamaracks (Larix Laricina) blending into the background of spruces, of which we can see both the loosely branched Black Spruce and the more sturdy White Spruce (Picea Glauca).  Black Spruce are normally far more tolerant of the soggy, acidic conditions a bog presents, but all plants that can make it here are adaptable and survivors, so here we see the White Spruces managing just fine outside of their normal habitat in well-drained, but moist, soils.  Obscured by cloud shade in the background is slightly higher ground where can be found many more White Spruces, but also Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus), which, again, can be found slightly off to the right and left of this picture, most likely taking advantage of the full sun conditions found at the edge of a bog.  These pines are common bonus features in bogs in the lower eastern part of their boreal expanse.

Now, this is all well and good you say, but what's in it for me?  Quite a few settlers shared this question, because, well, a bog is hard to build on, and does not necessarily drain even as well as a normal swamp.  Like a normal swamp, however, they can absorb floods and even filter the local ground water nicely, despite the tea-colour their surface water presents.  In addition to the human-related benefits, bogs are vital ecological areas for quite a bit of biomass, which is something of a minor miracle considering as how they are formed in and continue to acidify waters that sometimes cannot support a single fish.

Sunday Afternoon Post: The Yucca Forests of Southern New Mexico

Along I-10 in New Mexico, between Deming and Lordsburg, one drives through a literal forest of yuccas.  Pictures do not do the scenery justice, but they can afford a taste of the experience.

I-10 westbound looking north.  There were way more of them there than the picture suggests, probably because we were moving at a decent clip.

I was expecting creosote flats typical of the basins of the hot deserts, but instead found a lush, if sharp, forest.  Our deserts are as dry as the rest of them, and far more hot than so many around the world, but somehow have a lot more life to them.

The Wonderfully Lonely Land of High Plains Wyoming

There are many seemingly desolate stretches of land in western North America, but a few forlorn locations actually make these seem to be lush and abuzz with activity.  So it is for southeastern Wyoming, an area that boasts an urban corridor not far to the south (Denver-Fort Collins) and a city of its own, Cheyenne, and yet remains as open and unbroken as in the days when it was resided in by the Lakota and Cheyenne peoples.  Little remains of their world outside of the reservations, and truck stops and hydro towers have since reminded travelers that even here in the open, the modern world is not far away.  Then again, sometimes that old world does make an appearance.

I-25 northbound looking east, barely into the state of Wyoming.  An interstate, fences, and transmission lines working together could not diminish the glory of this moment and landscape.

Now understand something: I have been across the continent many, many times.  Not once until and since this time have I seen a buffalo (Bison Bison).  There it was, though, grazing on the High Plains, surrounded by signs of modernity, and yet it still managed to make the location look wild and free.  In a few miles, I-25 would head through all four and a half miles of Cheyenne, but then almost immediately, the plains would open back up and a herd would come to watch the few passing cars.

I-25 northbound looking east, about 20 miles north of Cheyenne.  

The proghorn (Antilocapra Americana) fared far better than the buffalo did, and these days there are many herds of them in Wyoming.  They congregate here perhaps because the land is a bit less fenced in.  While I did notice a little bit of barbed wire here and there, the land generally still felt wild and free.  I suppose that if anyone wants to get a feel for what the High Plains were once like, they would do well to visit eastern Wyoming.  Such a trip would be good not only to experience the essence of the shortgrass prairies, but also helpful in debunking any myths about the land being a flat barren country.  

I-25 northbound, 25 miles north of Cheyenne, looking towards Laramie Peak, which rises 5,000 feet over the surrounding shortgrass prairie, topping off at an altitude of 10,200 feet.  The peak is 40 miles distant from this point.

The land is anything but either.  It is dotted in bluffs, buttes, cliffs, rolling hills, and covered in lush grasses, cacti, yuccas, and the odd pine and juniper that descends and survives from higher ground. 

I-25 northbound looking east, somewhere between Glendo and Douglas, Wyoming.

Still, the sky is bigger than the earth, the vistas seem to go on forever, and the land is an excellent place to forget about a lot of things and clear out the head.   Like northeastern New Mexico, it is a meeting place of grasslands, mountains, and high deserts, but the atmosphere here is different.  There are no large cholla cacti or Pueblo ruins, and there are no remains of a Spanish culture in this land that was far enough away to escape the dreams of empire.  The Canadiens did make their way through here, but as was the case elsewhere, they left little to memorialize their passing.  The snow stays on the ground here until well until May in some years.  Like eastern Colorado, the land here is where the east and west part their separate ways botanically, but this part of Wyoming lacks the dramatic rise of the Front Range of the Rockies, the great mountains instead having risen into relatively isolated peaks.  Whereas neighboring Colorado is dominated by the mountains which rise on the horizon even over 100 miles away, this is a land where grasslands and Rockies blend more subtly and smoothly, as if both were tranquilized by the serenity of the vast horizons.  

Green Is My Platte Valley

A week ago we traveled to the Platte River and saw this exotic waterway give life and passage among some otherwise open and dry prairies.  We had a nice image of the sandy river banks being well-vegetated, but what is the view like for travelers "sticking to the trail" on modern I-80?

Sorry for the blur.  Blame the windows on the Archway.

Green and deceptive.  This view takes in a western horizon of the straight and level I-80 from atop the Archway Monument at Kearney, Nebraska, which is a bridge that crosses the interstate and has a museum dedicated to the western trails and development of the highways that would run through the valley.  I-80 is the modern version of these routes, and it stays within or at the limits of the upper floodplain of the Platte through most of central and western Nebraska.  Straight on, you can see forests of ashes, willows, cottonwoods, Eastern Redcedars (Juniperus Virginiana) and some oaks.  On the left of the image, you can see the land dip down into the river itself, and the right of the image is vegetated by another stretch of moist soil along a nearby creek.  If one were to look to the north or south of this vantage, however, they would find a lot of open farmland and stretches of prairie beyond the fields.

Still, the half mile on either side of the river is forested these days, and probably was before it was nearly clear cut during the days of the pioneer trails.  The effect is that of one long oasis of woodlands stretching across the Great Plains.

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.

The Great Canadian (North American, Really) Bridge

Mattawa, Ontario.  A small town of barely over 2,000 people that is largely dependent on the tourism and timber industries.  There are no stoplights here, and most people just pass through the place to more (apparently) interesting locations.

Then again, someone stopping at the local museum might actually find out that Mattawa was actually once quite the hub of activity, even if that activity was largely based on river travel and involved people passing through the small confluence of two rivers at the base of the Laurentian Mountains.

To the south, travelers would later favor roads traveled by walkers, horsemen, and eventually automobiles, but for the Canadiens and native peoples, the rivers were the roads.  Voyageurs and missionaries opened up the heart of a mysterious continent long before the steady stream of advancing "civilization" was filtering through the Appalachians.

Early on, however, the Canadiens faced a remarkable double obstacle: the Niagara Escarpment and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) nations.  An easy route to the upper Great Lakes and the lands to the west in the interior seemed to be a distant dream in the face of a thundering waterfall and towering limestone cliffs, to say nothing of nations that took an almost immediate hostility to a foreign power that had founds friends among their traditional enemies, the Wendat (Hurons) and Algonquins.  Fortunately for Champlain and the newly arrived French, those same enemies had long since known about a fairly level water passage into the upper lakes.  This passage existed far to the north of the Haudenosaunee and the newly forming English and Dutch colonies on the shores of Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts.  This passage, which connected the French and Ottawa River valleys, existed in a rugged northern land that had winters even more severe than in Quebec, and was important to the Wendat, Algonquins, and numerous nations to the north.  The southerners, as a result, would have to contend with multiple fronts if they wanted to keep the French out of the interior.

They could not.  Even after the Haudenosaunee were pacified by a surge of troops from France in the late 17th century, the Mattawa passage had so conveniently opened up a rather large river network to the Canadiens that it never got abandoned in favor of a more climate-friendly southern route through the lower lakes.  The great location of the passage even meant that it took primacy of importance over the Mississippi network which would be opened up following the founding of New Orleans.  Again, an enemy proved that the Mattawa route was far too valuable to abandon, the foe this time being the Spanish who continued to expand northward through Tejas.  So what did this passage connect?

Everything from Quebec clear to the Rockies, including the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, Platte, Illinois, Wabash, Des Moines, Red, Saskatchewan, Niobara, Nelson, St. Croix, and many other rivers.  The red route which was denied to the French and their allies for so long eventually became insignificant, as that small yellow dot you see in northern Ontario proved to be the most vital link in the great chain of North American rivers.  The Mattawa passage, in fact, was the Canadian equivalent to the Erie Canal (lime line in New York) which would later be the passage to open up volumes of traffic into the American interior, built in the core Haudenosaunee territory no less.

Even after the time of the canoe had long gone by, the position of Mattawa remained important, and the trans-Canadian railroad commenced construction not far away in a sleepy Franco-Ontarian town of Bonfield.  The line still passes through Mattawa to this very day, alongside the Trans-Canada Highway.  So what does this confluence of rivers look like these days?

The water in the foreground is the Mattawa River, with the water in the background being the larger Ottawa River.  The land in behind the Ottawa is Quebec, while the vantage point and the land to the left of the falling slope in the background is Ontario.

The confluence looks very much like a scene that Champlain and the Jesuits would have encountered in their time, even with a railroad bridge and a town just off the view of the camera vantage point.