Tangent: But first, 2 things about the last post. First, if you ever want to find out how many coworkers really read your blog, do a post like that one. All week long, coworkers have been coming up to me, saying (mostly) nice things* about how they’ll miss working with me, mentioning that they read the post, and sometimes asking a follow-on question or two to try to get a handle on the details of the past-blown-up deal or B or C or some other aspect of the LQC*.
*A couple even hugged me, which I thought was kind of nice. In general, I’m not a Gratuitous Hugger, but I have some great co-workers. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I ever did a tangent on Gratuitous Hugging, which is a rich, rich topic. Oh well, possible material for Part 2.
**Never gonna tell. But contrary to what Co-worker Matt is spreading, there is no anagramming involved. Seriously, the guy sat down in my office yesterday trying to Da Vinci-Decode “ABC…” One of the odd things in my life, BTW, that I think has been if anything exacerbated by this blog, is that people generally assume I’m smarter than I am. Really, I’m not all that bright- I’m just interested in a lot of things and like to run off at the mouth. Lots of times I’ll be talking with someone and they’re looking at me and I can tell they’re thinking, “Boy, I wonder what he’s thinking about right now- probably some deep, important stuff…” But mostly I’m just thinking about when I can next go for my next bike ride. Or lunch.
Second, I’m sorry- especially to male readers- about the “We Have To Talk” teaser. Because men are terrified of that phrase. When our wives/SOs say it to us, we simply have no idea what’s coming next. We honestly don’t know if they’re going to ask us for a divorce, or our opinion on the color for the new drapes. Really, we think it could be either. Because in relationships- and this is the truth- men never really have any idea of what is going on. Oh, we like to think we do, but we’re pretty clueless. We’re like long-distance drivers who have absolutely no idea how an engine works. We know we’re supposed to fill the tank with gas when the light comes on and maybe check the oil every once in a while. We generally think that when we get back in the car and start up everything will run just fine, but for all we know the next time we turn the key the engine might just blow up, like at the end of The Mechanic. That’s kind of like… oh, you get it already.
Monday night OCRick and I drove down South to Gooseberry Mesa. After a quick night-ride on the Bench level we drove on up onto the Mesa and camped. I looked up at the stars for a while and saw Perseus, Auriga, Gemini, the Big Dipper, Draco*, Orion, Taurus, the Pleiades, Jupiter, Cassiopeia, and much more.
*Thanks, Doug M.!
Tangent: We have a new favorite Phenomenally Awesome Campsite on Gooseberry. For years we had an Awesome Campsite, but about a year ago it got taken out by a cell tower. Then back in October, we stumbled across the new, Phenomenally Awesome Campsite, which turns out- incredibly- to be even better than the Old Awesome Campsite. It’s 2WD accessible, private, right on singletrack, and the view, well…
No, I’m not showing it on a map here. If you’re headed down there, email me and I’ll give you the beta.
The next day we rode all over the mesa. We pedaled past Piñonand Juniper and Cliffrose and Sagebrush and Mormon Tea and Prickly Pear and Turbinella Oak, and rolled over the Shinarump Conglomerate and the Lower Sandstone Member of the Chinle formation. The rock surfaces were dotted with bits of crustose lichens, and shady spots bore bright green swathes of moss. Away from the trail, in the open spaces between the trees, I spied rich black patches of mature cryptogamic soils. We heard the calls of Pinyon Jays, caught glimpses of the banded red & white Moenkopi members below the rim, the Wingate cliffs and Navajo domes of Zion in to the North, and the massive laccolith of the Pine Valley range to the West.
Tangent: So you’re probably wondering how I like my new bike. After careful testing, I’ve assembled this highly technical Evaluation Assessment Matrix (may be too advanced for non-technical readers):
Seriously, I love it. The low bottom bracket requires a bit of “awareness”, but gives the bike a wonderfully stable feel on fast descents. And the brakes deliver a masterful sense of effortless controlled power, even if the sounds emanating from them remind me of the zombies in The Walking Dead. I could prattle on about this or that feature, but the most remarkable (and surprising) thing about a full-suspension carbon 29er with a through-axle fork is that you don’t get tired. After a full day on Gooseberry in the off-season I just can’t believe how good I feel. My wrists, butt, neck, legs, arms- everything feels great. And the next morning I feel, well, normal.
All of these things- and the stars the night before- I not only recognized, but now knew something about their stories: what they were, where they came from, why they were here- pretty much none of which I knew 3 years ago. Though there will always be new bugs, birds, rocks, shrubs and stars to learn about, by any reasonable measure, I’ve completed the project. I’ve watched the world wake up.
My plan was always that this project would have a start and an end. And this is probably a good point to wrap it up. Except…
Now that I finally have all kinds of time and freedom, I’m going to get to go to all sorts of cool places and see all sorts of cool things- stuff really worth blogging about. So I’ll probably blog again, which means starting a new blog. I’d probably leave a pointer here to the new blog for any readers who were interested, which is kind of silly, because then, well, it’s really the same blog… So here’s what I intend to do:
Next week I’ll complete the project, which I’ll call Part 1. After I wrap up Part 1, I’ll take a brief break from blogging- probably around a month*. Then, I intend to start Part 2.
*Couple reasons for the break. First, I’ll have said my piece and feel I can let it sit for a bit. Second, I want a break. Third, I’ll be traveling light in a third-world-y kind of place where I don’t really want to be dragging a laptop around.
All About Part 2
Part 2 will be more focused on travels, places and experiences over the coming year- it won’t simply be a continuation of blogging about the Wasatch and Northern Utah. And it’ll be different than Part 1 in other ways. Posting will be less frequent, and there may be other changes in tone, perspective and focus.
Note that I said “intend”. I’ll start Part 2 when- and if- it feels right. I’ve always felt this project worked best when I wanted- was itching- to blog, which fortunately, was most of the time. When I felt I had to blog, well, it felt kind of like a job. I’m taking a break from jobs- of all kinds- for a bit. I think (and hope) that I’ll be itching to blog again soon, but if not, Part 1 will stand on its own.
So that’s the “plan”, such as it is. Next week I’ll finally get around to explaining the thing I probably should have explained when I started the project- the Wasatch. And some other stuff.
Let me start by saying that, in general, I think it’s kind of pretentious to do a retrospective-year-in-review-type post, because doing so implies that a) the blog is more important/has a bigger audience than it actually does, b) the year was somehow exceptional or notable, which it really wasn’t (with the obvious though admittedly not-world-shattering exception that it was the first year I had a helmet-cam), c) even if it was an exceptional year, that I would somehow be in any way more qualified than any other Average Joe to, er, retrospect it, d) that the visual content of this blog somehow merits review/re-posting, and e) I think they always come off as a wee pit pretentious.
But, I’m doing it anyway, because a) I’ve been looking at a bunch of old helmet-cam clips this past week, which have really highlighted the remarkable changes in the living world over the course of the year, b) it allows me to get a post up during this quasi-nether-week without doing any real* research, and c) I guess, if we’re completely honest, I am just a wee bit pretentious.
*Just to be clear- the issue here is that I am lazy- not that I am unimaginative, or in any way out of cool post ideas. In fact I have a great two-fer brewing for next week, about a cool predator and hearing.
I get this weird thing about seasons every year. In the Summer I’ll be walking around in shorts and a T-shirt, maybe hiking or biking past some spot in the woods up in the mountains, and I’ll think that in just a few months, the forest all around me will be leafless, freezing cold, and under several feet of snow. And while I know it consciously, I just can’t really believe it. It just doesn’t seem intuitively possible that the same place could be so different in such a short time. Then 6 months later, skiing or what-not in the backcountry, I’ll have the exact opposite experience, looking around at the frozen silent forest, trying to imagine it green and leafy and warm and full of flowers and hummingbirds and dragonflies, and I just can’t really believe that it’ll be that different so soon. That all this snow will somehow melt away and the dead forest will just come back to life.
Tangent: I’ve been fascinated by the place-change effect of seasons for a long time, since long before starting this project, or even knew anything about forests. In the summer of 2001 I decided to photograph the same spot on the same trail weekly throughout the Summer/Fall. I didn’t see it through, but still have some of the old photos, reposted below.
During past winters I’ve sometimes reality-checked myself by looking through photos from the preceding summer, which helps, but a still photo is just that- a still. But this year, looking at old video-clips, I’ve found a connection to the past cycle of seasons I never managed to experience before.
So anyway, I started to do a kind of a month-by-month helmet-cam retrospective, intending to document the change of seasons and be all kind of artsy and such, but by the time I got to May, I thought, “Man, this is a lot of singletrack through leafless scrub-oak footage…” So instead, I’m just going post a bunch of my favorite helmet-cam clips from 2010. Here we go:
The Clips, Already
Some of the best early season clips I got were down South. This is a portion of the descent of Upper JEM outside of Hurricane, UT, traversing the upper 3 members* of the Moenkopi formation. The trail is lined mainly with Blackbrush and the occasional Utah Juniper up top, with Rabbitbrush and Mormon Tea joining in lower on down. I love the flow of this clip, the way the land changes color as we tranisition between geologic members, the weird light and ominous clouds. Pine Valley Range in the distance.
*Upper Red, Shnabkaib, Middle Red
Tangent: Yes, that’s right. The helmet-cam was my Christmas present last year. What’s that? What did I get this year? Well, I received several nice gifts, but one of the most interesting was a pair of Eyeclops Nightvision Infrared Binoculars. They’re not real night vision binoculars, like the kind of light-amplifying devices used by the military and such, but rather an infrared flashlight attached to a camera-viewer.It’s a fun little toy and I hope to use it for things like night-time bug-hunting, maybe checking out scorpions and such down in the desert come spring.
But in playing around with it (pic below, left = living room chair viewed in darkness) , I discovered a curious and unexpected side effect, which is this: it appears that artificial hair coloring doesn’t show up in infrared light. [I actually have a great photo that displays the effect, but unfortunately I can’t post the photo here, for reasons I can’t really get into.*] Meaning that when you look at someone with colored hair through the infrared viewer, their hair looks gray or white. You can actually pick up the viewer, scan a room full of people, and instantly see who’s dying their hair- Isn’t that freaky??
*Because Awesome Wife would likely leave me if I posted it. If you’re a real-world friend and want to see it, email me- it is way, way freaky.
Back in March I was in the same area with the team, and filmed this clip of the road descent into La Verkin with Teammate-Perry. I like this one for the rush of speed, as well as the physio-geographic significance: We’re crossing the Hurricane Fault here, dropping off the very, very Western edge of the Colorado Plateau and into the Basin and Range country, which extends clear to the Sierra Nevada.
Further down in the Mojave, this clip is from outside Blue Diamond, just outside of Las Vegas. The riding is slow and light dim, but I love the otherworldly feel of this ridge, following the faint singletrack, as well as the sense of solitude and open space just ~20 miles from the spawl and noise of the city. The tall yuccas alongside the trail are Spanish Dagger. Spring Range in the distance.
OK, this one isn’t helmet-cam, but I’m including it anyway. It’s driving across a wash in the Mojave, specifically Beaver Dam Wash, the lowest point in Utah. I love the blast of sun and green and water all together way out in the middle of this dry, spiky expanse of desert.
Tangent: What’s that? You’re wondering what else I got for Christmas. Well I got whole bunch of great books on my latest obsession, er, I mean interest- history of the first peoples in the Americas, and in the Great Basin in particular. (My recent rockartencounters have piqued my curiosity.) And I got some CDs and some more of that quick-drying underwear, and oh, yeah, this:
OK, so I bought myself that one…
Back up in Utah, this is one of one of my favorite stretches of Gooseberry Mesa, the South rim. Following Hunky Neighbor here, we’re rolling across the Shinarump Conglomerate, which marks the transition from Moenkopi to Chinle formations. About a minute in we roll up onto the next Chinle member “up”- the Lower Sandstone Member. We’re passing by Blackbrush, Mormon Tea, Cliffrose, Turbinella Oak, Utah Juniper and Singleleaf Piñon. Little Creek Mesa in the distance.
Closer to home, a couple of May bird-sightings. Here’s a male Black-Headed Grosbeak singing alongside the Shoreline Trail up above the Capitol…
And here’s a soaring Red-Tailed Hawk from Jack’s Peak. Oquirrh Range, Great Salt Lake, Antelope Island and Salt Lake Salient* in the distance.
*No, I haven’t explained this yet- it’s the geologic formation that comprises what I generally refer to as the “foothills” at the North end of Salt lake Valley. We’ll get to it when I do my Geology of the Wasatch post. (And yes, I will do a Geology of the Wasatch post one day and it will be awesome- my veritable Wasatch Opus. You will not want to miss it.)
Around the 1st week of June the forests around 7,000 – 8,000 feet practically explode in greenery. Here’s a clip from up in Pinebrook. The leaves (mainly Maple & Aspen) are only partway out, still that light, lime green color, and the underbrush (mainly Ninebark & Snowberry) though green, is still low, only recently freed from the weight of the snowpack.
Just 2 weeks later, on the eve of the solstice, I took this clip from the Northern (and best) stretch of the Mid-Mountain trail, passing through several Aspen groves. You can’t see it in the clip, but the trail is lined with blooming Sticky Geranium and Wild Rose.
I did some cool summer road trips this year. This clip is from along the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, riding the Rainbow Rim Trail. The tall conifers are Ponderosa pines. In stretches we pass through stands of Gambel Oak and New Mexican Locust. Out at the point we roll by a couple of Colorado Piñons, and finish off with a corridor of blooming Cliffrose. This section smelled fantastic. (At 2:27 I glance into the inner gorge.)
This clip turned out cool. It’s the full moon rising over the Paunsaugunt as I pedaled the bike path back to camp. There are all kinds of cool conifers on the Paunsaugunt. It’s hard to tell in the dark, but I’m pretty sure we’re passing through Douglas Fir and Ponderosa.
OK, another non helmet-cam clip, but a good view of Redfish Lake up in the Stanley Basin of Idaho.
Earlier that same day, here’s a clip from up on the ridge on the West side of the lake (so on the right side of the previous clip) with some nice views of the lake. The trees on this stretch are Douglas Fir, and geologically I suspect I’m rolling over a glacial moraine, not from the last glacial advance, but from the one before, likely ~100,000 years ago.
Later on that vacation, here’s a clip from our campsite on the Lochsa River up in Northern Idaho.
Tangent: I just realized that reading the 2 previous tangents, you probably think that the only thing I care about around Christmas is getting presents. I assure you, nothing could be further from the truth. For while I certainly enjoy receiving gifts, I certainly know what really makes Christmas a truly unique, special and magical time, which of course is Making Fun of People’s Holiday Cards. Oh come on, you know you do it too. Every family has a Crazy Aunt or some such who sends out a whacky form letter every year that you and your significant other just can’t wait to get.* Actually, in all seriousness, I like Christmas card-form-letters**. Yes, sometimes they have a lot of detail, but they’re a great way to get caught up on the lives of friends and family you don’t get to see very often.
*Sadly, my own Crazy Aunt stopped sending us her card/letter a few years ago. I can’t figure out if she stopped doing it altogether, or somehow got wind of me making fun of it and took me off the list. It’s a shame, I loved it. It was always written in this super-happy upbeat tone, but kept mentioning things that seemed borderline inappropriate for a Christmas card. Actual line from a past edition: “After breaking off his engagement, Tad*** bought a VW Rabbit and moved to California…”
**Except for the downer ones. You know, the ones that go, “It’s been a year of challenges for the Hetzweigs; Hal lost his job in May, Betty’s back in rehab, and we had to put down Rasputin this year, but we’re hopeful little Petey will learn to cope with his deep anger issues…” Gee, I’m sorry it’s been rough, but did you have to dump all this on us the week before Christmas? Couldn’t you have emailed me or something back in October?
***Not his real name.
The truth is, there’s only one type of holiday card that drives me batty, and that is the Card With New, Unidentified, Unannounced and Unexplained Family Members. I’m not talking babies or pets here- I’m talking adults. Several years ago one of my cousins sent us all a card with a picture of him, his wife, their 2 teenage sons, and… another teenaged boy. We don’t see this cousin but every few years, but so far as we knew, he’d always had 2 kids. Could we have somehow missed one over the years? We doubted it. The card had no explanation, and we chat so infrequently with him, his parents or his siblings that there wasn’t a smooth way to just call him up on some other pretext and say, “Oh, BTW, who’s the other teenager on your Christmas card?” And because we felt awkward asking, by the time the next year’s card came around (again, with mystery teen) it was too late to ask, and so… anyway it was like 2 or 3 years before we were clued in*.
*He was a teen from a troubled home who played basketball with their sons and whom they took in and became his legal guardians. A totally awesome, inspiring story. I just wish they’d noted it in the card so we weren’t scratching our heads (and then semi-faking like we already knew) for so long…
This year, we got a card from AW’s cousin, a single(?) man with a young son. The card said, “Happy Holidays from the Jones* Family” and had a photo of the cousin, his son, a middle-aged woman and 3 teenaged girls. Who are these people? No note, no names, no nothing**. None of these women were in his card last year. We hadn’t heard of a wedding or even a serious girlfriend and suddenly we get the Brady Bunch Christmas card… We are totally clueless…
*Not his real name.
**Which is ironic, because this is the kind of Christmas card that totally merits a lengthy detailed form-letter…
Closer to home, the Wasatch Crest always makes for good video. This clip is from SkiBikeJunkie,Coryalis and my 83-mile Fourth of July Super-Crest tour. You can tell by the low brush/grasses and the light Aspen leaves that it’s still early in the summer. In addition to the usual Wasatch characters, we pass a number of Limber Pines between around 1:00 and 1:20.
For comparison, here’s a piece of that same stretch, exactly 2 months later. Check out how much higher (and drier) the grasses are, and how the Aspen leaves are now a dark, mature green.
This next clip I like- even with the problematic lighting- because it’s one of my favorite stretches of Great Western Trail, and also because it’s my only helmet-cam clip of, er, me. SBJ was kind enough to film it later during the Super-Crest ride. The conifers in the shady sections here are mostly Engelmann Spruce, which do real well on these North-facing slopes*
*And have been doing even better following a century+ of fire suppression in the Wasatch.
Here’s part of that same stretch 3 months later, the trail now lined with fallen Aspen leaves. Passing through the darker Spruce stands, the golden underbrush seems almost to glow, lighting up the forest from below.
The colors peaked in mid-October. Here’s another stretch of Mid-Mountain, about 2 miles North, and 4 months after, the Solstice-Eve clip up above.
Later in the Fall we returned to Gooseberry, where I took this clip following Fast Jimmy through Piñon-Juniper along the rim, with glimpses of the banded Moenkopi formations below.
In mid-November I followed Cory on this high-speed descent down into City Creek. The oaks and maples are bare, the grasses wilted and brown, the sky gray. The landscape is practically begging for snow. We’re rolling over conglomerate soils here, eroded down from the tertiary conglomerate cliffs above. I’ve been trying to keep up with Cory on the downhills for 15 years now, and he just seems to be getting faster. We hit 29.9mph on this stretch.
I saved my favorite clip for last. It may seem like an odd pick, and my feelings aren’t hurt if you don’t like or get it. It’s slow and meandering, I’m alone, the scenery is unspectacular, and the trail rather undefined. It’s the descent of a side trail* off Mid-Mountain trail during the peak bloom of Serviceberry on the day before the summer solstice. The video’s slow and poky, but when I watch it I feel the sun on my neck and smell the brush all around. I feel the Serviceberry brushing my arms, the Sagebrush scratching my shins, my flexed stomach flat on the seat and the braking-burn in my forearms**. For me, this clip is Summer.
*Lower Finesse.
**Because yes, I am a Luddite and ride with v-brakes. Or rather rode. Did I mention my new bike?
Everything seems better in the light of day. In most cases, I don’t know why this is. We go to bed worried about work or our kids or spouses or that project we couldn’t get done or the President’s birth certificate or whatever and then when we wake up a few hours later, although the problem is still there, it somehow seems more manageable. This of course is the idea behind “sleeping on” a problem or challenge. It’s not that you actually figure it out while you’re unconscious, but rather that your mind somehow backs away from the ledge, so to speak.
But in the case of getting lost in the middle of the night in the desert, it’s very obvious why you feel better about your situation in the light of day: because you can freaking see where the hell you are. And though I was still “lost”, I could make out enough of the surrounding topography (pic left) to realize that I had in fact wandered a bit North and West of where I wanted to be. So I started up the rig and started slurping and slopping my way back South.
Getting Found
After about a mile and a half I came to one of those merging forks that I’d completely overlooked the night before, and saw fresh tire tracks in the mud in both forks. Since I’d seen no other tracks the night before, I knew someone had come this way after me. I stuck with the South fork. Another mile and a fence loomed- the national park boundary- next to which a pickup was pulled out. An older man stood by the open tailgate, cooking breakfast on a campstove.
The man- let’s call him Gene- wasn’t entirely sure where he was either, having also wandered in in the night, but had a better idea than I did and better maps to support that idea. He was also headed for the trailhead, to day-hike down to a rock art site, and advised me on his best guess of how to arrive there. I thanked Gene and continued South. Another mile or so and the road descended into a broad, sage-filled meadow, and morphed into 2 water-filled parallel canals* of uncertain depth, extending for at least the next 100 yards. This was the worst-looking section yet, and I stopped to check it out. For about 5 minutes I waffled on what to do- go for it or backtrack? If I got stuck there was a good chance Gene would be along, but still…
*Seriously, you could have paddled a kayak down along either tire-rut.
As I equivocated in the morning sun, I heard a low distant hum, then a rumble from across the meadow. Moments later a Nissan emerged from the Piñon-Juniper on the far side.
I’ve posted before about Arizona Steve, how we met almost 3 decades ago, our parallel lives and our long history of backcountry adventures together. We generally see each other once or twice a year, and whenever we do, I’m glad to see him. But of all the times we’ve met up, I don’t think I was ever gladder to see Arizona Steve than I was Thursday morning.
Steve had reached the trailhead at the ungodly hour of 1AM, then set his alarm for dawn to come looking for me. He’d encountered many of the same navigational challenges I had, but had persevered due to a combination of better gear* and superior 4WD juju.** We convoyed through multiple mud bogs another 8 miles to the trailhead, where we broke out packs and assembled gear.
*GPS with full topo map set.
**Probably part skill, part confidence, part cojones.
Side Note: The guide we used for the hike and access was theFalcon Guideauthored by George Steck. His directions to the trailhead are ~20 years old, and in the intervening decades the park service has closed some of the roads described by him. Steck provides 2 access routes- one South via June Tank, the other East from Graham Ranch. The June Tank route is basically intact, is shorter and easier, but more vulnerable to rain/snow. The Graham Ranch route, which was always longer and more complicated, has changed significantly.
One gets the sense that conditions in the canyon may have also have changed. In some cases, Steck describes a bypass for a trivial obstacle, but then makes no mention of a fairly challenging section less than ½ a mile down-canyon.
*Jumble of boulders immediately up-canyon from the conglomerate arch.
**Jumble of boulders just below junction with Northeast arm of the canyon.
The Tuckup trailhead lies on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon at roughly 5,800 feet, atop the Kaibab limestone layer, which I mtn biked over of back in July over on the Kaibab Plateau, some ~35 miles to the East. The surrounding woodland consisted largely of familiar plants- Colorado Piñon, Utah Juniper, Cliffrose, and occasional thickets of Gambel Oak or the lone Serviceberry. As we strode off the rim and started our trek downward, these plants hung on sporadically over the next few hundred yards before sputtering out completely, to be replaced by a scrubland of Rabbitbrush and Snakeweed.
Botanical Side Note: Just below the rim, occurring sporadically down a few hundred feet, was this holly-like bush with tough, leathery, sharp-spiked leaves. It’s Fremont’s Mahonia, Mahonia fremontii, and it’s very closely-related to (same genus) Oregon Grape*. Like Oregon Grape it’s an evergreen.I’ve seen this shrub all over Arizona, as far South as the Ajo Mountains down by the Mexican border, but I haven’t come across it in Utah, though the guides say it occurs in the Southern part of our state as well.
It’s eye-catching and easy to pick out; the persistent leaves seem to bend and cup and “swoop”, almost like hundreds of tiny gesturing hands.
*BTW, there’s an error in the Oregon Grape post: I listed it as belonging to Ranunculaceae, the Buttercup family. It- and Fremont’s Mahonia- actually belong to Berberadiceae, the Barberry family, and both families belong to the order Ranunculales. Sometime soon I will get around to fixing the error. I know nobody cares about this but me, but I’m trying to correct old mistakes when I can.
We dropped off the Kaibab Formation and descended a short sloping, crumbly section called the Toroweap formation, laid down in a warm, shallow intermittent/recurring sea bottom some ~255 - 270 million years ago. Rocks in here are supposed to be great spots to hunt for marine fossils, but both times we passed through this layer- the very, very beginning and very, very end of the trip- we were blowing through pretty quickly. Immediately below the Toroweap we passed through another cliff-y band, the Coconino Sandstone, which I blogged about back in July on the Kaibab Plateau. Below the Coconino is a long band of soft crumbly shale slopes, which might have been tricky when dry, but full of moisture from the recent rains were a breeze to pass over. This is the Hermit Formation, thought to consist mainly of freshwater stream deposits on a broad coastal plain some ~280 million years ago.
About half-way down the Hermit slope, we started to encounter an old nemesis:Acacia greggii, Catclaw Acacia, which I posted about last January down in the Sonoran. These Catclaws would turn out to be the dominant shrub of the canyon , their prickly presence a near-constant companion clear down to the river another 3,000 feet below. Their persistent thorns spelled the end of one of my 2 T-shirts* on the trip.
*On backpacking trips I bring 1 extra T-shirt, 1 extra pair of underpants and 1 extra pair of socks. Changing into the clean T-shirt is always a little mini-highlight of the trip. After 3 or 4 dusty, sweaty days, the detergent and fabric-softener smell of a clean tee is like this wonderfully shocking little concussion of sudden hygiene in the desert.
At the bottom of the Hermit slope, the land flattened out into a broad terrace ringing the canyon on all sides. This terrace, which occurs pretty much the length of the Grand Canyon, is known as the Esplanade, and geologically it marks the transition from the Hermit shale to what is known as the Supai Group. The Supai consists of 3 mixed limestone-shale formations*, capped by a layer of harder Sandstone, the Esplanade Sandstone. This cap-layer is harder, erodes more slowly than the Supai formations below or the Hermit above, and is the reason for the terrace. We crossed a short stretch of Esplanade and dropped into a side canyon.
*Specifically- from topmost layer moving downward- the Wescogame, Manachaka and Watahomigi, none of which are particularly spectacular, despite their thoroughly awesome names, so it’s pretty easy to miss the transition from one to the next as you’re hiking along if you’re not paying close attention.
The trail wound downward through the Supai Group and through the acacias, dumping us out in a minor wash which led us a short distance to the floor of Tuckup Canyon proper. The canyon here is open, broad and dry, lined on either side by the low, shale-y slopes of the Watahomigi. But within a hundred yards the canyon began to be lined by outcroppings, then bluffs, then cliffs, of dark red sandstone. This is the Redwall Formation, one of the most notable features of the Grand Canyon and it would be the primary geologic component of the canyon until were below the junction with Cottonwood Canyon.
Though it looks superficially similar to some of the slickrock you see up around Moab or Canyonlands, the Redwall Formation (pic left) is a whole different deal. As I mentioned back in the Kaibab post, the Colorado Plateau is tilted in such a way as to form a virtual geologic “staircase”, meaning that the further South you go, the older the exposed rock layers are. The Redwall Formation, up to 800 feet thick, was laid down between 320 and 360 million years ago, on the bottom of a sea that lay here. By “here”, I mean this hunk of land that is now part of the modern continent of North America. Back then it lay some ~35 degrees of latitude to the South, more or less on the equator.
The Ancient Gallery
But all that was still ahead. Just a ~1/2 mile down-canyon, as the first red bluffs rose on our left, we spotted them: looming ancient figures gazing down on us from the overhang above. We’d reached Shaman’s Gallery.
I’ve posted about ancient rock art before, but not in such a remote location. The exact date of Euromerican discovery of the site isn’t clear, but probably occurred in the early 20th century. What makes Shaman’s Gallery remarkable is not just its remote-ness, but also its scale. It’s a huge, magnificent panel, similar in size to the Harvest Scene in the Maze District of Canyonlands, rich in figures, geometric designs and, well, doodles(?). It’s also- once you manage to get there- very accessible, by which I mean that you’re right up next to the drawings, as close as you wish. The panel lies on an overhang at a roughly 45 degree angle, shielding the art from the elements and creating a pleasant mid-day shade on the slickrock “walkway” along the bottom of the panel. Free from sun, fences, signage, other visitors, or visible sign of modern civilization, it may well be the most wonderful rock art site I’ve visited yet.*
*Though the Harvest Scene is pretty phenomenal as well.
Extra Detail: The site is not without controversy. A little googling of “Shaman’s Gallery” will quickly reveal something of the controversy surrounding the site’s discovery, location, publicity, access and even name. I won’t try to re-tell the various sides of the issue here, but we were disappointed to spot a bit of modern graffiti on the panel*.
*Which shocked us, given the tedious, time-consuming access to the site. You have to want to get to this place. Rock Art defacement isn’t unusual, and I’ve seen plenty of it around St. George and along the upper Paria River. But I’m still always amazed that people do it. There are some cases- the wholesale lifting/removal of panels- that can at least be explained by greed, but the more destructive defacement boggles my mind. Ultimately the root causes can only be malice, ignorance or both. I like to think more of the latter than the former, because I like to think that ignorance can (at least theoretically) be cured, but maybe I’m just kidding myself.
Steve and I de-packed, snacked in the shade, and then spent the next ½ hour checking out the panel. The dominant features are the huge humanoid figures, but the panel is full of countless smaller, more intricate designs as well. Shaman’s Gallery is interesting in that it belongs to a distinctive and fairly localized motif.
All About Style
Rock art in the Southwest spans a period of several thousand years, and unsurprisingly, styles varied considerably over distance and time, like culture and language. I did another rock art post late last year over around St. George, and most of the art highlighted in that post was what would broadly be categorized as Anasazi*. Anasazi- specifically Western Anasazi- is the most obvious and prevalent (but certainly not only) rock art around St. George, but it’s not the most common style across most of Utah. The most common style is the Barrier Canyon Style, an archaic motif dating anywhere from 500 BC to 4000 BC, and possibly as far back as 6000 BC. Barrier Canyon, of which Horseshoe Canyon (Canyonlands, Maze District) and Thompson Wash (Book Cliffs) are classic examples. It typically features rows of (usually) faceless ghostly figures, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, looking down upon the beholder. They’re thought to represent shamans or other supernatural beings, and the ghostly appearance may represent the metaphorical death experience by ancient shamans in trance-like states. (Or maybe not. But it’s cool to think about.)
*Except for the stuff over by the Maverik- that’s definitely Archaic, Fremont I think.
Extra Detail: Some of the stylistic differences between rock art styles and periods are obvious. For example, if you see a guy on a horse, you know it was drawn after European contact. If you see bow and arrow you know it’s Anasazi, specifically Basketmaker III or later, because the bow and arrow doesn’t appear to have been widespread in the Great Basin before around 500 AD.
Extra Extra Detail: Ever wonder how the Indians got the bow and arrow? I always assumed they’d invented it independently of the (much earlier) Old World invention, and thought it a charming example of “convergent innovation.” But it’s actually thought that it was introduced to the New World via the Arctic some 5,000 years ago by one or more of the “Paleo-Eskimo”* groups. Bow & arrow seemed to be largely “stuck” in the Arctic until around 0 AD, at which time it started moving Southward.
*“Paleo-Eskimo” is a huge, huge brush-over of human history in the Arctic over the last several thousand years, which I regret, but the fascinating and unresolved story of the Thule, Dorset and other ancient Arctic cultures is simply too big a tangent even for me for bite off.
I’ve seen several Barrier Canyon sites before, and initially assumed Shaman’s Gallery to be another. But it turns out to be something different- the Grand Canyon Polychrome style (GCP). GCP is similar in many ways to Barrier Canyon and is thought to be derived from it. But it shows a number of interesting differences. The humanoid/anthropomorph figures tend to be more crowded- almost lined up.
Many show features such as arms, hands, fingers, toes, eyelashes (pic below) and even eyes with pupils.
Another recurring motif is multi-headed anthropomorphic forms, such as the 3-headed figure in the shot below. The skeletal aspect of the figure to the left of the 3-headed guy BTW is a motif common to both Barrier Canyon and GCP styles, and is thought to be tied to the re-birth-type experience of the shaman.
What’s interesting about GCP is that most of these additional features to the Barrier Canyon style seem to be derived from a completely different style far to the Southeast- the Pecos River Style of West/South Texas. This style, centered around the confluence of the Pecos and the Rio Grande, lies some ~600 miles distant from the Grand Canyon, and so the existence of GCP suggests ancient links between cultures widely separated geographically.
The panel contains multiple “overwritten” figures, and it’s difficult to tell what was drawn when. Some of the elements, such as the whiter pigments, appear to be much later additions, possibly from Anasazi times. In other words, this panel was probably revisited, and added to, over as much as a few thousands years. When the later artists visited the site, they likely viewed it as something already cryptically ancient, left behind by an unknown and mysterious people. The span of time separating the later artists from their predecessors was likely several times longer than the time separating us from the last artists.
Tangent: It’s this timescale issue of pre-Columbian peoples that blows me away, and which I feel most Euromericans way under-appreciate. Our history in the New World is overwhelmingly focused on the written histories over the last five centuries. But paleo-Indians spent probably 500+ generations here before that. When we read US history textbooks, they usually start off with a few (rather patronizing) pages about Native Americans before launching into the arrival of Europeans and dedicating dozens of pages to detailed accounts of everything from Tariff and Nullification to Espionage and Sedition Acts.
In fairness, this bias is understandable; we just don’t have clear written histories of these peoples, and can only make inferences from the signs, arts and relics they left behind. But the resultant “quick-wash” passes over millennia of history and millions of individual human stories, and that’s what really hits me when I come across ancient rock art. These were people with full, long lives, just like us. They had hopes and fear and friends and lovers and enemies and long, drama-filled soap-opera-saga lives that were every bit as important and urgent and wonderful and heartbreaking to them as ours are to us. Who passed by here? What became of them- not as a “people”, but as individuals? Was he hoping to find someone/something? Reach someplace? What happened to him, and the dozens, hundreds, or likely thousands of others who sheltered on this ledge over 10,000 years or more? Maybe one of those passers-by was a refugee, or an outcast, hundreds of miles from home, speaking a strange language, and he sketched in the style of his distant homeland, a style later adopted by other artists…
We think we’re different. After all, there’s a record of our stories- documents, numbers, photos, videos, blogs- surely our stories won’t be lost. But our age is a blip in history, and it’s completely unknown to any of us whether any of our stories will be recorded or known or in any way recoverable 10,000 years from now. And in any case, a billion or so years from now, after the expanding sun has boiled the oceans and charred the Earth, it seems unlikely that anyone will ever know that Steve and I sat on a shady ledge in a desert canyon.
Arizona Steve shouldered our packs and remarked at our good fortune. We’d found each other in good time, started our trek more or less on schedule and already had seen a wonderful site. We stepped back into the bright sun and continued down-canyon, our thoughts shifting to water and campsites.
Next Up: The plant KanyonKris should never screw around with.
It’s going to be another 1-post week, due to work, travel and other stuff. It’ll be another astro-post, and I hope to have it up tomorrow. If I had more time I’d try to do some sort of foliage-related post, as the colors in the Wasatch* have been spectacular these past couple of weeks.
*I explained how and why leaves change color in this post and this post, a topic I revisited in this post and this post. Man, even in a a filler post, it is like I have a post for everything.
The forecast indicated that the Summer-y weather would finally end Monday, so Saturday afternoon I hitched a ride* up to Pinebrook, pedaled up to Mid-Mountain, climbed over the saddle and then rolled down the entire Mill Creek drainage home. Here’s the initial descent off the saddle:
Down lower, the singletrack wound me though aspen and PLTs (mostly Engelmann Spruce) over and over. The aspens sometimes closed in, creating a “Golden Tunnel” effect (check out 1:00 – 1:05):
And in the PLTs, the yellow understory seemed to light up in the dark Spruce forest and fallen aspen leaves sprinkled the trail with flecks of gold.
Even the road section between the Big Water and Elbow Fork trailheads had some great scenery. The stand of Narrowleaf Cottonwoods lining the road at 0:38 is one of my favorite spots in the whole canyon.
A couple months from now when everything’s gray and brown and cold, it’ll be nice to play these clips in my office…
20 years ago a girlfriend and I quit our jobs in Massachusetts and spent the summer traveling around the Western US and Canada looking for the best place to live.
Tangent: Leading up to the trip, we did all sorts of research, reading stuff like Places Rated Almanac and just about every “Best Places to Live” article we could get our hands on. Even today, 20 years later, I always end up clicking/browsing links to those “best Places” articles, even though I can’t stand ~99% of them. Here are my 2 big complaints:
First, most of them really go out of their way to be geographically diverse, like the editors are suiting around and saying, “OK, so we got Eugene, OR, Burlington, VT and Santa Fe, NM. We need something from the Midwest. How about Pierre, South Dakota?” So there are always like 3 or 4 places in the middle of BF nowhere and you’re like WTF? Is some poor sap really going to read this and pick up and move to freaking Pierre??
Second, they love to include outdoor towns like Bend, Oregon or Ketchum, Idaho, or Telluride, Colorado, where the 2 career choices are a) Destitute Ski Bum/Stoner/Espresso Bar Barista or b) Freaking Bazillionaire Who Buys $5M Second Homes. But the for remaining ~9X% of us who work for actual companies and have to spend less than $5M on a home, these aren’t even “Places to Live”, much less “Best Places to Live.”
And third (OK so I guess I have 3 complaints, not 2) every one of these articles includes Portland, Oregon. OK, we get it already- Portland’s a great place to live- it’s affordable, has real jobs and plenty of bike paths and organic markets and homeless shelters to assuage our Liberal Guilt. How about these articles just say, “Hey, move to Oregon already- it’s probably way better than whatever dump you live in…”
Later in the trip, we crossed back into the US from Canada, and zig-zagged our way South down the Idaho Panhandle. In doing so, we found ourselves- largely by accident- camped along the Lochsa River. Over a couple of days we camped in what I remember as being one of the most beautiful forests I’ve ever seen and hiked to the loveliest hot springs I’ve ever visited. Ever since, I’ve been meaning to get back up to the Lochsa.
But the Lochsa isn’t particularly convenient to the places I’ve lived since, and years have stretched into decades. Finally this year we planned a vacation where we could reach it. But as we drove North I was apprehensive. Sometimes places we remember so fondly for so long aren’t quite what we remember. What if it were not-so-great, and I’d dragged the family all this way North*, instead of staying around Stanley a few more days?
*The drive from Stanley to Lolo Pass takes the better part of a day. Even though they’re not all that far apart as the crow flies, central Idaho is dominated by the massive, road-less, Selway-Bitterroot and Frank Church-River Of No Return wilderness areas, necessitating circuitous, indirect routes between the Northern and Southern portions of the state. Several hours into the drive, as we inched our way through the endless road construction in Montana’s Bitteroot Valley, I heard a text beep through on my phone. Assuming it was a work-related thing, I ignored it. An hour or so later I checked my texts when we stopped at Lolo Pass. It was from AW, who, while sitting next to me at the time, had texted, “where the f**k are going??”
I needn’t have worried. The forests of the Lochsa, and the hot springs we hiked to, were every bit as wonderful and lovely as I remembered. And upon our arrival, now knowing a bit about Western forests, I realized why: The Lochsa Valley is a stunning Eastward extension of the Columbian Forest.
I explained the Columbian Forest last summer when we visited Glacier National Park, and you can check out that post for the full story, but the quickie summary is that in parts of Northern Idaho, Western Montana, Southern BC & Alberta, the Northwest storm tracks carry enough precipitation far enough inland to create a forest that is in many ways more Pac-Northwest than Rocky Mountains in species and character.
Which brings me to he first really weird* thing about Missoula, Montana, the closest sizeable “city”. Imagine if you lived in Salt Lake, and the Wasatch was there and all that, but if you drove up over Parley Summit, or OK, maybe a little further- like to Kamas- that all of a sudden, the forest and the vegetation suddenly switch and be totally different, like something from Western Washington or Oregon. Wouldn’t that be totally freaky? Well, that’s exactly the deal with Missoula. You scoot around, hiking or biking in the hills around town and it’s more or less standard Rocky Mountain stuff (with a few extras, like Western Larch higher up.) But you drive just 35-40 minutes Southwest over Lolo Pass (pic left), and it’s like you pass into a whole other state. Well, OK that’s a bad example, because you actually do drive into another state- the pass sits on the border between Montana and Idaho. But the point is that for most of us in the Intermountain West, if we want to stroll amongst wet, damp, Northwesty-style Cedar-Hemlock forest, we have to drive or fly for several hundred miles. In Missoula, it’s just 40 minutes over the hill.
*Actually, the really weird thing about Missoula is that Colin Meloy, lead singer/songwriter for the Decemberists, is from there. I know I shouldn’t be judgmental, but it throws me for a loop that the mind behind this rather cosmopolitan-sounding band, who sings of sailing ships to South Australia , Greek nymphs and French Legionnaires, hails from some hick town in Western Montana. (OK, yes, I know he’s actually from Helena, and just went to school in Missoula, but really that just kind of emphasizes my point…) Yes, I know Missoula is cosmopolitan for Montana, but…
Something I’ve always thought to do when passing through Missoula is spend a few hours locating the various spots mentioned in the “Apology Song”, like the Orange Street Food Farm and the French Town Pond, and… well I guess it’s just 2 places really. But I never get around to it.
Over the next 2 days, from our campsite-base on the Lochsa, we hiked and explored through forests, along creeks, and to hot springs. The trees were lovely, as I knew from last summer up in Glacier. But as I paid more attention, I noticed that practically everything was different, and the Lochsa Valley was filled with all sorts of things completely absent on the other side of the hill, including several of the most interesting and unusual wildflowers I’ve yet come across.
Weird Flower #1 – Stamens as Petals
Framing the entrance to our campsite were stands of this bloom, with its distinctive green center and super-narrow white petals. It’s False Bugbane, Trautvetteria caroliniensis, (pic left) and it’s a great example of yet another way to be a flower.
Side Note: We camped at White Sands Campground, which was our favorite of the several upper Lochsa campgrounds. It’s small, set about a mile away from the highway, and the sites (7 of them, all with river access) are too small to accommodate large RVs. Here’s a quick clip of the river from our campsite at dusk.
Jerry Johnson CG was our least favorite- treeless and hot, in full view of the highway. Wendover was our second favorite, followed by Whitehouse. Powell was also a nice campground, but dominated by obscenely-sized RVs.
False Bugbane is a member of Ranunculuceae, the Buttercup family, and you may notice the strong resemblance of the green, ovule-packed center to that of Utah Buttercup which we saw back in early June up on Flying Dog. But the narrow, visually-striking “petals” are something else entirely- they’re stamens. False Bugbane has no petals, but the stamens have assumed the function of petals, presumably visually attracting pollinators and bearing pollen-filled anthers; this guy’s stamens do double-duty.
Extra Detail: False Bugbane occurs in both Western and Eastern North America (but not in between.) In the East it’s called Carolina Bugbane. The name comes from it’s resemblance and structural similarities to- yes, that’s right- the actual real Bugbane, flowers of the genus Actaea, another member of the Buttercup family, a plant sometimes known as Baneberry. Acatea is full of cardiogenic toxins which can cause fast and serious problems if ingested. The berries are the most poisonous part of the plant (hence the name) and have killed people- especially children- who’ve eaten them. Actaea is closely related to Aconitum, the genus of our old, deadly-toxic-but-beautiful friend from last summer, Western Monkshood.
False Bugbane does have sepals however, 4 of them, white, which you can see highlighted in the photo below. As new flowers prepare to bloom, the stamens are completely enclosed in a sphere formed by the 4 close sepals. As they open, they liberate the much-longer stamens, which quickly eclipse them.
The next morning we hiked up to Jerry Johnson hot springs, an easy hike through cathedral-like groves of Western Red Cedar, the sunlight gently filtering down to the open forest floor. The hot springs are probably the nicest I’ve visited anywhere- just as wonderful as I remembered.
Extra Detail: I explained how hot springs work in this post, which you can check out if you’re interested. There are several hot springs along side draws off the Lochsa, and we hiked to another- Weir Creek- the next day. Though many of the hot springs are worth visiting, Jerry Johnson- although the most popular- is probably also the best, not just for ease of access, but because the use of the area is more closely-regulated- no use after dark, no camping- which keeps trash, graffiti and abuse down to a minimum.
Weird Flower #2 – Leaves as Petals
The forest floor alongside the trail, though relatively open, supported a number of lovely blooms. Particularly interesting was this one, Bunchberry, Cornus Canadensis(pic left).
DISCLAIMER: The Bunchberry photos in this post aren’t mine*. Though I saw several blooming patches alongside the trail, all were slightly post-peak, and I kept thinking, “Oh not yet, I’ll see a better one…” which of course I never did. The photos used came from here and here.
*Lame as my photos are, they’re a (admittedly odd) point of pride for me in this whole project, the point of which isn’t just to blog about cool stuff, but to blog (and therefore learn about) the cool stuff in I come across in my life..
Bunchberry is a low forb, growing only to about 6 or 8 inches in height. But the flowers and leaves are basically the same as you might have seen on trees, specifically Dogwoods (family = Cornaceae.) Bunchberry is basically a teeny-shrub-sized Dogwood. But that’s not the really interesting thing about it. No, the really interesting thing about bunchberry- actually the two really interesting things- both have to do with its flowers.
Bunchberry is another flower where things are not quite what they seem. At first glance it’s a white, 4-petaled flower. But when you get down and look at it closely, you’ll notice 2 things. First, the “petals” are of very similar shape and form to the green leaves underneath. That’s because they’re not petals; they’re leaves. They second thing you’ll notice is that the little “dots” comprising the center of the “flower” are actually each little miniature flowers themselves.
So what you’re looking at in a Bunchberry bloom isn’t a flower, but rather a “bunch” of very tiny flowers framed by 4 specially-adapted, petal-like leaves. The leaves, BTW are partially persistent (evergreen); some number endure throughout the winter. Come late summer/early Fall, the Bunchberry “flower”’s true nature is revealed as the fertilized micro-flowers each develop into their own berry, so that a single, visible, macro- “flower” appears to develop into a bunch of berries (pic right, nope not mine either), giving the plant its common name. Also BTW, the berries are edible, though each contains a large, crunchy seed.
But the teensy-miniature “micro-flowers” of the Bunchberry blossom are fascinating in their own right- they “explode”.
Each little flower has elastic petals with springy filaments cocked underneath. Attached to these filaments are tint containers holding pollen. When a visiting insect (bee, moth fly) alights on one of the petals, it flips backward, releasing the filaments, and ejecting the pollen, all within half a millisecond, making this one of the fastest known instances of motion by any plant*.
*To get it on film requires filming at ~10,000 frames/second. Here’s a link to an awesome video of a Bunchberry flower exploding.
False Bugbane and Bunchberry are both fascinating in that they demonstrate fundamentally different architectures and approaches to being a flower, in each case leverage alternative anatomical structures to serve the function of petals in signaling pollinators. But the third Lochsa flower in this post is weirder still.
Weird Flower #3 – No Chlorophyll
On the hike back, I caught sight of a stand of low (maybe 1’ high) pinkish-reddish stalks in the shade of a Cedar grove. My heart quickened with that fun, familiar sensation of finally seeing something in the real world that I’ve seen before only in guidebooks- Pinedrops!
Pinedrop, Pterospora andromedeae, is a weird, fascinating plant. It’s a member of the Heath Family*, Ericaceae. It’s myco-heterotrophic, meaning that it’s dependent on a fungal partner for survival. Pinedrop isn’t green because it isn’t photosynthetic; it obtains its nutrients via its fungal partners.
*I noticed that its downward-pointing, bell-shaped flowers are vaguely structurally similar to those of Manzanita, another Heath family member we’ve looked at in passing. (Though I realize now I’ve never done a proper post on it, which I really ought to correct, seeing as it’s so common in mainly of the places I frequent.)
Extra Detail:P. andromedeae does contain trace amounts of chlorophyll, but at a level of something like one-millionth that of most photosynthetic plants, give or take an order of magnitude. It’s believed that this trace chlorophyll is a relict of its photosynthetic ancestry, as are the scattered scales along its stalks, thought to be vestigial leaves.
Many of the details of the nature of the relationship between P. andromedeae and its fungal partners are still unclear. In fact, much about this plant is unclear. We don’t know for instance, what pollinates it (though the shape of the flowers suggests Bumblebees.) We don’t know whether it’s perennial, or long-term monocarpic. (A monocarpic plant is one that flowers, seeds and then dies.) We don’t know how often (which years) it blooms. We don’t even know for sure whether or not it reproduces vegetatively via root-cloning, which sounds like an easy enough thing to check out, but as will see in a moment, is a bit of a, er, “tangle” in the case of Pinedrop.
So. What do we know about Pinedrop? First and foremost, we know that it only exists in the company of one of several species of fungus of the genus Rhizopogon. A Pinedrop seed will only germinate in soil where Rhizopogon already is growing. Without Rhizopogon, a Pinedrop seed will never, ever (so far as is known) germinate. But what’s fascinating about this requirement is that the seed does not have to be in contact with the fungal hyphae*; the fungus just has to be in the soil close by**, which implies that some as yet undiscovered compound or chemical produced by or associated with the fungus acts as the germination-trigger.
*See this post and this post for basic info on fungus and its structure.
**Exactly how close I wasn’t able to find out for this post.
Extra Detail: There’s currently only one accepted species of Pinedrop. But there’s some evidence that there are distinct lineages of Pinedrops, each associated with only a single species- of subset of species- of Rhizopogon. In Western North America it may be that there two lineages of Pinedrops. In the East, things appear to be more complicated*.
*Complicating things further, some Pinedrop seeds have germinated in the lab in response to Rhizopogon species they’re not associated with in the wild.
But the fungus doesn’t just stimulate the plant; it appears that the plant may also stimulate the fungus. When a Pinedrop seed does germinate, the fungus rapidly grows around the roots, soon completely covering them in hyphae, such that the roots of the plant hardly come into direct contact with the soil. Pinedrops occur in stands of fewer than a dozen stalks to over 500, but underground beneath the stalks is a tangled mess of roots and hyphae such that botanists have been unable to tell which/whether stalks are connected to one another, and whether or not a given stand is a clone. (Genetic analysis could resolve the issue. To my knowledge, as of 2002 no such analysis had been conducted.)
So the fungus encases the roots, and the plant gets its nutrients via the fungus. Is it getting them from the fungus, or through the fungus? Here’s where things get really interesting.
Rhizopogon is a mycorrhizal fungus, which we looked at previously and have a mutualistic relationship with many trees and shrubs, including Pines and Oaks. The hyphae of these fungi serve as virtual extensions of root networks, allowing the plant to access water over a much greater area than it could do with roots alone. The fungi in turn feed off of carbohydrates manufactured by photosynthesis and delivered to the roots via the plant’s vascular system. A Rhizopogon “occurrence”* is connected to the root network of a tree, specifically a Pinaceae, such as Pine or Fir.
So the Pinedrop isn’t just connected to the fungus; it’s connected- via the fungus- to the tree. Research with radiotracing** back in the 1960s showed between trees and fungally connected Dutchman’s Pipe, Monotropa hypopithys, another non-chlorophyllous plant that is closely-related to Pinedrop, showed that material does move via these fungal networks from tree to myco-heterotroph.
*I can’t really say “body” as we discussed in this post.
**Using a radioisotope to track the movement of a substance through a natural systems (cells, tissues).
So it’s not clear what Pinedrop is taking from the tree, what it’s taking from the fungus, or what, if anything, the fungus is getting out of the deal. Pinedrop is a weird and fascinating plant with a biology and lifecycle that still leaves much to be discovered.
Extra Detail: Pinedrop also occurs in the Northeast, though much less commonly, and in a patchier distribution, from Wisconsin to the maritime provinces. In New England it occurs in just a couple of isolated locations, though historic records indicate that it was previously more widespread. There seems to be some possible correlation in the East with it range and areas that were glaciated during the most recent ice age. I haven’t found any reference to a similar glacial-distribution I the West, but I know that the floor of the Lochsa Valley- where we encountered the plant- was ice-free during the Wisconsin Glaciation.
The Lochsa Valley features many other plants, such as St. Johns Wort and Ginger, that are absent on the other side of the pass. I could probably spend a summer in the valley just blogging about the wonderful things growing there. But vacation was running out, and after 2 days in the valley we packed up and headed back over the pass to Missoula.
Bonus Detail: There’s actually, according to sources I’ve read, and a helpful ranger in the Orofino office, an even better, more fantastic, more Northwesty-like example of Columbian Forest in the Idaho Panhandle, the Aquarius Natural Research Area, which lies to the Northwest of the Lochsa and North of Orofino, and which was completely unknown to botanists before the late 1960s. I’d hoped to visit the area this year, but won’t make it there before next summer, by which time I plan to have completed this project. If you find yourself in or near the Panhandle, contact the Orofino USFS office for info.
