A Tree and a Rock

This month I have no news about the serviceberry I’m following. I’m far from home, in a warmer drier land. So instead, here’s a report of a tree I came across on a narrow precipitous ridge crest, holding a boulder in its roots! This was curious enough in itself, but just as interesting were the thoughts it brought to mind. I realized this tree was keeping the boulder from continuing a trip that had started maybe sixty million years ago. Trapped by the tree, it couldn’t make the next leg—a steep 2000-foot descent to the Green River. But the delay would be minor, basically imperceptible. Even five hundred years of imprisonment would be but a fleeting obstacle in this boulder’s journey.

Next leg of the trip—down to the Green River, 2000 feet below the ridge crest.

This is not a local rock—not sandstone, siltstone nor shale. It’s hard tough quartzite, which is why it survived the long punishing journey that started 60 million years ago in the high country of a newly-created mountain range to the north. A fragment of bedrock—perhaps broken by folding, faulting, or frost—was carried many miles by streams, bumped and bashed, worn smooth and round, and left here.

The rock itself is far older than the mountain range. It began as sand in a deep rift valley, 700 million years ago.

For maybe 30 million years, weathering and erosion chipped away at the mountains, reducing them to sand, dirt and pieces of rock. That’s typical—as soon as mountains rise, demolition begins. “Mountains seem massive, abiding and immutable … yet if we look carefully at rocks, if we use them to peer into the past and conjure up the world they came from, we find that mountains too are ephemeral.”

The piles of sand, rock and dirt along the trail used to be part of a mountain range.

The amount of debris carried down and deposited was so immense that the mountain range was largely buried in its own rubble. Probably only the highest peaks stood above extensive gently-sloping surfaces. Then the land rose again—not as mountains, but the entire region. Erosion went back to work, this time exhuming the old buried landscape. It removed much of the debris deposited just a few million years before, but not all. Relic patches remain today on high surfaces—like the narrow precipitous ridge I walked. But unless things change, this too will be gone.

In the meantime, the quartzite boulder will have to wait a bit, because hundreds of years ago a pine seedling managed to get established and now has grown large. Its roots grew down into the pile of debris, circumvented the quartzite boulder, and trapped it. Though trail construction exposed the boulder, it can’t roll down to the Green River just yet. It has to wait until the tree dies and the roots decay. But given the scale of its life, I doubt that it feels the least bit impatient.

Now let’s consider the tree. It’s a pinyon—Pinus edulis (“pine edible”)—one of millions growing in the vast pinyon-juniper woodlands of the American West. Because pinyons live in country that is cold in winter and dry for much of the growing season, they grow slowly, never getting very big. But they are trees of great bounty, producing abundant large seeds beloved of squirrels and jays and little boys.

The sticky green young cones contain maturing seeds, on which wildlife will depend for winter survival (as did people in the old days).

With the right beak or teeth, older cones can be torn from the tree and pulled apart to get at nutritious seeds.

Left alone, cones open on the tree and seeds fall of their own accord.

Big tasty pinyon nuts are worth hunting for—even if you’re only five years old!

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This Other Pinyon

He-push … cone eyes.

I guess it was a little odd … to go to the White Mountains and not visit the famous ancient bristlecone pines.  But I was looking for singleleaf pinyons.  A few weeks earlier I had hung out with two-needle pinyon pines on the Colorado Plateau.  So I wanted to get to know this other pinyon.

There are two common pinyon pines in the western US:  the two-needle or Colorado pinyon (Pinus edulis) on the Colorado Plateau and Rocky Mountain foothills; and the singleleaf pinyon (P. monophylla) in the Great Basin and southern California.

After Lanner 1981.

If you look east across the Great Basin from the White Mountains, you'll see range after range covered in singleleaf pinyon - Utah juniper woodland.

This is an arid-lands kind of vegetation.  It grows in some of the driest pine habitat in the world (Waring 2011).  Yet pinyon-juniper woodland is common at higher elevations in the White Mountains – at 8, 9, 10,000+ feet where “normally” we'd find montane forest.  But the Whites are dry.  They’re only about 25 miles east of the mighty Sierra Nevada, which casts a giant rain shadow.

Westerly winds carry considerable moisture from the Pacific Ocean across California, and when the air bumps up against mountain ranges, it rises and cools and moisture condenses out as rain and snow.  Then when the dried-out air descends on the east side of the mountains, it warms and expands and can hold more moisture.  So there’s a rain shadow, especially behind the great Sierra Nevada (more information here and here).

The area around Grand View Campground is quite dry, even though it’s at about 9000 feet elevation.  The pinyons generally were taller and grew more densely than the two-needles on the Colorado Plateau.  Is life a little easier? … the cooler climate a bit more hospitable?

It helps to start life beneath a nurse plant, in this case sagebrush (Artemesia tridentata).

An elder’s wise strategy:  invest in healthy tissue, let the rest die.

The dead may stand for years in this high dry country.

The singleleaf pinyons weren’t as pitchy as the hésho tsítonnê (two-needle pinyons) I saw in Utah.  I didn’t find any gum balls on the ground.  But there was plenty of pitch around fresh wounds.

It's obvious why these are singleleaf pinyons.  Most pines have 2-5 needles per fascicle, but the singleleaf has only one (a fascicle is a bundle of needle(s) with a sheath at the base). Singleleaf needles are stouter than the two-needle's, and have white lines on all sides – rows of stomata (pores for gas exchange).  Click on the next image to see.

Cones of the singleleaf pinyon are larger than those of the two-needle.  They seemed abundant in the White Mountains ... maybe recent years have been good ones.  I've read that female cones (the ones with seeds) develop in the upper part of the tree.  That is what I saw in larger trees.  Here's a singleleaf pinyon wearing a beautiful crown of cones.

Owens Valley and Sierra Nevada in distance.

Each cone scale bears a pair of seeds.  When the seeds fall out they leave cone eyes, called he-push in Panamint (Lanner 1981).

Pale-colored seeds like the next ones are almost always empty.  Pinyon jays know better than to bother with them.  They collect only the rich nutritious dark ones (Lanner 1981).

Next I drove east across Nevada and the Great Basin.  Wherever I stopped to check pinyon pines, I found singleleafs.  Near Ely, I camped in dense second-growth pinyon-juniper woodland.  The old charcoal ovens at Ward attested to the youth of the trees.  About 150 years ago, they were all cut down to make charcoal for smelters (mining).

I continued east through Utah to the Colorado Plateau, and was back in the land of the two-needle pinyon.  I made a great find at Colorado National Monument.  Near the picnic area, the two-needles were loaded with male cones … I’d not seen them before.  True to what I had read, they were mostly on lower branches.  And the junipers were loaded with berries too, maybe because of runoff from the parking lot.

 

There’s much that is awe-inspiring at Colorado National Monument.  I was especially impressed by the pinyons and junipers that have managed to create woodlands of sorts on the great monocline of the Uncompahgre Plateau.  These are small but tough trees!

Sources (in addition to links in post)

Lanner, RM.  1981.  The piñon pine, a natural and cultural history.  University of Nevada Press, Reno.

Waring, GL.  2011.  A natural history of the Intermountain West; its ecological and evolutionary story.  University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.

This month I’m following hésho tsítonnê

It’s the seventh of the month already! … time for monthly reports from tree-followers around the world.  But I’m 1200 miles from home and my willow.  I won't know what it’s doing until I return in a few weeks.  So I’m reporting on a surrogate, the pinyon pine – also known as hésho tsítonnê or gum tree.

I knew I would be in pinyon country, so I looked into pinyon pines before I left.  This earlier post is an overview.  So far I’ve been hanging out with the two-needle pinyon.  Together with Utah juniper (Juniperus osteosperma) it forms pinyon - juniper woodlands covering millions of acres.

Two-needle or Colorado pinyon, Pinus edulis.  Source.

Distribution of two-needle pinyon and its western relative, the singleleaf.  After Lanner 1981.

On harsh sites, pinyon pines can be especially photogenic ... tough gnarled little trees with disproportionate trunks and crowns.  These portraits were taken in sandstone country near spectacular Muley Point Overlook in southeast Utah.  Some of the pinyons were pretty spectacular too, in their own way.

Pinyon pine poses with Indian paintbrush in the foreground and Navajo Mountain behind.

This tree is only 4.5 feet tall, but the trunk is over a foot across at the base.

How about that switch-backing trunk! (click on image to view)  There's a close-up below.

Pinyon pines are quite pitchy, so much so that Zuni Indians called them hésho tsítonnê or gum trees.  The pinyons at my campsite were indeed gummy, and pitch blobs were scattered on the ground beneath mature trees.

Pitch is a plant resin.  It’s not the same as sap, which transports nutrients through the tree. In some cases, pitch is clearly protective and “may confound a wide range of herbivores, insects, and pathogens.”  Trees use it as a dressing on open wounds.

Pitch protecting an area where bark was removed.

Like the trees, Navajo and Hopi people used pinyon pitch to dress open wounds, sometimes mixing it with red clay.  Its most important use was in sealing water jugs.  There were many other applications – glue, dye, medicine and even a teflon-equivalent on sandstone griddles for cooking Pueblo wafer bread:

"It took them almost a day to get the stone properly heated, rub the squash oil into it and then rub it again with wads of piñon gum, which melted and sank into the pores.  They finished by scrubbing the stone with juniper and pine twigs, which left it clean and slightly scented.”  – Ruth Underhill, Workaday life of the Pueblos (in Lanner 1981)

In summer, the Navajo turned pinyon pine trees into shade shelters.  They cut off the lower branches and carefully sealed the stubs with mud.  For if they didn’t, pitch would rain down on inhabitants and their belongings.  What a horrendous sticky mess that would be!

Pitch is messy but it’s also magical, making pinyon wood the perfect fuel for an evening out.  It produces a hot sparkling aromatic campfire that frees the mind and lets it wander far from real world cares:

“Nobody who has sat before a roaring, pitch-boiling, bubbling, scented fire of piñon can think of it as the mere consumption of wood.  It is the spirited release of centuries of brilliant sunlight, absorbed under a cloudless Southwestern sky …”  – Ronald Lanner (1981)

Campfire of pinyon and juniper.  Even a few small dead branches will make a lively fire.

Sources (in addition to links in post)

Lanner, RM.  1981.  The piñon pine, a natural and cultural history.  University of Nevada Press, Reno.

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