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.

Dreaming of Pinyon Pines

Tree is about six feet tall; crown is twelve feet across and loaded with cones.

The small pine I dreamt about last night must have been a pinyon.  The site looked right: dry, rocky, sparsely-forested – really more of a woodland – and little ground cover.  Yes, it must have been a pinyon pine.

Do I repeat myself?  No, pinyon pine is not a tautology – not one of those pointless combinations of English and Spanish like Table Mesa (tr: Table Table) or Cuesta Grade (tr: Grade Grade).  A pinyon (piñón in Spanish) is the seed (often called a nut) of the pinyon pine (pino piñonero in Spanish).  We call the trees pinyons for short.

Small trees, small cones, BIG seeds!  Source.

The seeds of pinyon pines are large and nutritious – so much so that jays, humans and other animals put a lot of time and energy into collecting them.  Pinyon jays are especially dependent on pinyons.  In late summer, they go to work picking sticky sappy green cones and hammering them apart to extract fat seeds.  These they carry to traditional nesting areas, where they stash them on the ground among dead needles and twigs.  The jays continue collecting into fall; their work gets easier as the cones dry and open up.

By the time the harvest is over, many thousands of pinyons have been cached.  When spring comes, they're eaten by nesting female jays and the young fledglings.  But some seeds are always overlooked, and some germinate and grow.  Thus the jays return the favor … by planting pinyon pines.

Pinyon jay.  In the old days, Westerners called it the blue crow.  Source.

There was a time when people also survived on pinyons.  In the old days, tribes harvested and stored seeds each fall.  Tasty, nutritious, calorie-rich pine nuts made excellent winter food, especially where agriculture wasn’t possible.  But in some years, pinyon yields were poor; for tribes without agriculture, such years were very tough.

Pinyon pines are rare here in Wyoming.  This is the north edge of their range; they grow only in the extreme southwest part of the state.  When I visited Flaming Gorge Reservoir last fall, I found a few close to the state line (with Utah).  They were mostly saplings and young trees.  Does this mean the pinyon is extending its range?

Pinyon youngster.

Small but vigorous sapling.

Pinyon sapling in shady habitat.  The two-needle pinyon, Pinus edulis, is the one that grows in Wyoming.

Soon I will be where pinyon pines are common – where they partner with junipers to form pinyon-juniper woodlands that occupy more than 75,000 square miles in the western US.  On the Colorado Plateau, the pinyon is the two-needle, Pinus edulis, the source of "American" pine nuts.  As the name suggests, they have two needles per fascicle (bundle) ... usually.  Some individuals also have three-needled fascicles.

Two-needle pinyon pine, also called Colorado pinyon pine.

When I leave the Colorado Plateau and enter the Great Basin to the west, the pinyons will change.  Single-leaf pinyon, Pinus monophylla, will replace the two-needle.  As  you might guess, it has a single needle per fascicle.

Single-leaf pinyon.  Needles are single but still “bundled” – note fascicle along base of each.  Source.

I expect to see the single-leaf pinyon off-and-on for much of the trip, as it also grows in the Mojave Desert, Tehachapi Mountains and as far west as the southern Coast Ranges of California.  This was the first pinyon pine I met ... long ago.  I made its acquaintance in the Coast Ranges when I was a field botany student.  I look forward to renewing our friendship.

Where the pinyon pines grow.  After Lanner 1981.

I'm eager to find, photograph and learn more about pinyon pines.  Already they impress me, in part because they defy our concept of great trees.  We generally admire trees for being tall, strong and ancient.  We have organizations devoted to finding and registering the largest individual of the various kinds of trees – the champions.  But is anyone looking for a champion pinyon pine?  Probably not.

Two-needle pinyon with its woodland partner, the Utah juniper.  All three of us are 5 ft 6 in tall.

In harsh arid habitat, the pinyon pine’s small stature makes it a survivor.  It's tough, tenacious, and photogenic.  But it wasn’t always this way.  Pinyons used to be as tall as other trees.  This is what happened:

In the old days the Washo people lived by a river created by Wolf-god.  Every fall they gathered to collect pine nuts – and hunt, feast and sing.  But then there was a terrible drought and the river dried up.  Fires destroyed the pines, so there was no food.  Many people died; the rest were severely weakened. Wolf-god came back to help.  He scattered pine nuts, and trees soon grew.  But the people were too weak to climb.  Wolf-god tore off the tops of the trees, and put them directly in the ground.  The Washo could harvest nuts from the low crowns, so they survived.

Pinyons would be unaffordable if Wolf-god hadn’t made the cones easy to reach.  Source.

Sources (in addition to links in post)

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