All About My (Helmet) Hair

The weather in Northern Utah is doing its usual May shenanigans; one day it’s sunny and 70F, the next it’s drizzly and 40F. The upside is that the hillsides are turning a lovely green, with all sorts of spring blooms popping up. Up higher though, it’s still Winter, and recent snows have made skiing possible weeks after (nearly all of) the resorts have closed for the season.

Wednesday Morning I joined SkiBikeJunkie, Dug, Aaron, Rick and several others for a pre-work ski up in Little Cottonwood Canyon. I was time-challenged, and so accompanied the group up to the top of the ridge dividing Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons and then skied back down solo. Once at the bottom I realized I still had some extra time, so I re-climbed about 2/3 of the track for a second, shorter run. The snow was nice, if not exceptional, and it was a bit novel to ski in mid-May, and I skied back to the car feeling happy and upbeat about the day ahead. I unloaded my gear into the car, took off my boots and slid into the driver’s seat for the ride back down the canyon. As I did so, I glanced in the rear-view mirror, and…. pffffff…. my upbeat, happy mood slipped away: I was afflicted with Chronic Helmet-Head.

As I have mentioned previously, my place of work does not have a shower. When I ski or bike pre-work I shower the night before. In the summer I take along a sun-shower and do a quick Howie-Shower to mitigate the most severe Helmet-Head. Sometimes I do so after skiing as well, but due to a recent mishap involving a rear SUV-hatch, a bike rack and a fumble, I have been without an operable sunshower this last week and a half. So all day Wednesday I worked- in the office- with a bizarrely-spiky head of hair.

I wear a helmet- usually bike, sometimes ski- almost every day. Back in Life 1.0, I often wore a motorcycle helmet. Helmet-Head has been a constant throughout my entire adult life. What’s the deal with it, anyway?

Hair, the evolution of hair, and the evolution of modern human hair patterns, is absolutely fascinating. Hair- true hair- is unique to mammals*, and is one of the 5 defining characteristics** of the class.

*Insect “hairs”, BTW, are something completely different; they’re actually bristles made of chitin.

**The other 4 being mammary glands in females, sweat glands, 3 middle ear bones, and a brain with a neocortex region (which I explained in this post).

The protein that comprises our hair- keratin*- is the same protein that composes our fingernails and toenails. More interestingly, it’s nearly identical to a protein in the claws of birds and reptiles, suggesting that hair is a mammalian exaptation of an existing structure- in this case the proto-keratin protein- of our ~300 million-year-old common ancestor.

*I mentioned keratin last year, when I blogged about Porcupines, and specifically their quills.

Different peoples around the world have varying hair thicknesses and profiles, but all of our hair is composed of 3 concentric layers. The outermost is the cuticle. It’s thin and colorless, serves to protect the hair and consists of teeny-tiny, hard overlapping plates. The second, thicker, layer is the cortex, and this is the layer that contains melanin, giving hair its color. There are 2 kinds of melanin: eumelanin and pheomelanin*. Eumelanin produces brown or black hair, pheomelanin red. Blonde hair is the result of very little melanin (of either type.) Hairs with no melanin are gray.

*”Eu” of course = “good” and though I don’t know Latin, I know that “feo” = “ugly” in Spanish… That seems unfair. And wrong. I for one have always found red hair very attractive… Uh oh. I feel a tangent coming on in a footnote. In my younger years, I totally had a thing for redheads. I had 4 (that I recall) relationsh- well, “entanglements” I should say- with redheads in my early 20’s, all of which ended rather quickly and spectacularly poorly. I usually try to avoid stereotypes, but the “feisty redhead” was repeatedly true in my limited experience**.

**Although in fairness, if we were to consider all of the relationships in my 20’s that ended quickly and poorly, I’m not sure the proportion of those involving redheads would be all that much greater than the occurrence of redheads in the population as a whole.

The inner layer is the medulla and is light-reflecting, which is why hair often looks different in direct sunlight.

When I say modern human hair patterns, I am talking the pattern of hairs over our bodies. I am not talking about our hair-styles (or lack thereof.) The average European* adult has about 5 million hairs on their body, of which only about 100,000 – 150,000 occur on your head. Before you protest that you don’t have that much armpit or pubic hair, the 5 million number includes both terminal and vellus hair. Terminal hair is the (relatively) thick, dark visible hair on your head and elsewhere. Vellus hair is the teeny-tiny peach fuzz all over the rest of your body. Whether you are male or female, you’re almost totally covered in hair- it’s just vellus hair.

Tangent: Speaking of hair styles, in the break-room at work, people sometimes leave magazines. Right now, for whatever reason, there’s just one magazine: “Hair Style Guide”. The interior is filled with photos of- yes, that’s right- hair styles! Page after page- it’s like hair-porn! I know there are magazines for everything nowadays, but really? A whole monthly magazine about nothing but hair styles? Really? That’s what you’re reading??

Nested Tangent: So here’s my favorite break-room magazine story. We used to have a super-conservative “Christian” receptionist. At the time some of my female coworkers left a dozen or so women’s magazines in the break-room. Nothing racy- no Cosmo or even Redbook- just stuff like “Self” and maybe an issue of “Glamour.” The receptionist made actual covers for the magazines out of brown-paper bags, so that the cover-photos of bare-shouldered, cleavage-suggesting women would not be in plain view in the break-room.

A given hair follicle produces either terminal or vellus hair, but what’s interesting is that a follicle can change from producing one to the other. At puberty, we typically say that young people “start growing” hair in their groin and armpits, as well as their chests and faces if male. But they were already growing hair- vellus hair- in those regions for years. At puberty the follicles switched from producing vellus to terminal hair.

A bit later, we often say that many men “lose” their hair. But they generally don’t lose it; rather the follicles on their heads stop producing terminal and switch to producing vellus hairs. We have very few truly hairless patches of skin: our palms, lips, soles of feet, behind the ears, some scars and certain areas of our genitals.

Tangent: Here’s another example of follicle-switching: ear-hair in old men. Ear-hairs in old guys fascinate me because they’re follicles switching from vellus to terminal production late in life. Here’s my prediction: within 50 years scientists will develop a true “cure” for baldness, and the key breakthrough will come about as the result of research into the ear-hair of old guys. You heard it here first.

The evolution of human hair pattern, texture and color is a way fascinating topic, and way beyond the scope of this post. There are all kinds of hypotheses as to why most of our follicles produce vellus, making us effectively “hairless”, but they all have problems/inconsistencies. Almost all other land-based mammals our size are covered with terminal hairs. Marine mammals aren’t, but they have an obvious reason to be hairless- drag in the water*- and so generally compensate for the lack of warming fur with a special layer of fat. A number of really big mammals, such as elephants and rhinos, are “hairless”, but their greater mass makes heat-loss less of an issue.

*Plus, wet hair doesn’t retain heat as well as dry hair.

Humans are thought to have become hairless around 1.5 – 2.0 million years ago, and the reason anthropologists think this is the case is because that’s when they believe the genetic mutation came about in a gene called MC1R which resulted in darker skin pigment. Prior to dark skin, it’s thought that naked*, hairless humans would fair poorly under the equatorial sun**.

*And it’s pretty certain we were naked for a long time. The best guess as to when the use of clothing became widespread is way more recent, like maybe only 70,000 years ago, a key piece of evidence being the genetically-determined date of divergence between head lice and body lice (which reside in clothing) which we looked at in this post.

**Not necessarily because of sunburn and skin cancer, but possibly because of folate-damage, as we covered in this post. Man, it is like I have a post for everything.

Why our ancestors “lost” their hair is unresolved. One long-standing hypothesis is that the loss coincided with the general drying or large areas of Africa and the formation of savanna, and may have come about to facilitate sweating and heat-dissipation. But hair also mitigates heat-accumulation, which is thought to be why we retained it on our heads…. Another, more recent, hypothesis is that hairlessness evolved as a countermeasure against parasites. Once the trend started, sexual selection could have amplified the tendency, with hairless suitors advertising their relatively parasite-free fitness. But if that were the case, why aren’t lots of other land-based animals our size hairless? And why are female humans more hairless than male humans?

OK, lots of questions here, and I’m not going to resolve them in this post, so let’s just focus on what’s really important- my hair. Referring again to my style-afflicted photo, you’ll notice 2 things. First, I am of European descent, and second, my hair is pretty straight.

Tangent: You may also have noticed that my hairstyle is pretty lame. In fact, I have had- no kidding- essentially the same hairstyle since 1971 (minus the beard.) Certainly, as an adult man of reasonable means, I could afford to invest in some professional, modern-day hairstyling. But the truth is that at a gut level- I just feel that there is something fundamentally and distinctly un-masculine about paying more than $10 for a haircut. There, I said it.

The straight hair part is the thing I want to zero in on. Our closest relatives- chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans- are covered with straight hair. But modern day Africans have tightly-coiled hair. A covering of tightly-coiled hair has more airspaces and airflow than a pile of flat hairs lying on top of one another, and so may well be cooler under a hot sun. And sweaty tightly-coiled hair doesn’t cling to the scalp, neck and forehead nearly as badly as sweaty straight hair. Of course, like so much in human appearance- skin color, eye color, beards- such hair form might be the result of sexual selection, but there’s a strong tendency for peoples with tightly-coiled hair to be found at equatorial latitudes. So it’s suspected that our common African ancestors also had tightly-coiled hair, but that groups that migrated elsewhere- say Europe or East Asia- subsequently re-evolved straight hair.

The question is why? Was it just the case that straight hair, no longer being a liability, happened to catch on and spread through those populations? Or was there some benefit to straight hair in Northern climates? Perhaps a flat-lying head of straight hair was a bit warmer, but the most far-out hypothesis is that straight hair helps absorb UV light, which is though to be the same driver of the evolution of light skin pigment in cold/un-sunny climates. Human hair can actually transmit UV light along its length in a manner similar to a fiber optic tube!

The problem with the straight-hair/fiber-optic-UV hypothesis is that unless you have a buzz-cut- or extremely bad Watcher-style Helmet-Head- the ends of your hairs are not pointed up toward the sun. But the counter-counter-hypothesis points out that downward-pointing hair-ends are well-positioned to received UV light reflected upward from snow. See what I mean? There are like a gazillion hair hypotheses!

Back to me and my fashion-crisis. The reason my Helmet-Head is so problematic is not just because I am wearing a helmet, but because I am wearing a helmet and sweating, thereby make my compressed, mushed-up hair wet.

When wet, hair holds water and expands. The old adage about not weighing yourself when your hair is wet is technically true; wet hair weighs about 30% more- even heavier if your hair is dried/damaged beforehand. The diameter of the strands increases by 15-20%, and- we are finally getting to the point here, so pay attention- the cuticle-flakes separate a bit and don’t overlap quite so tightly. This relaxing of the cuticle means two things. First, your hair is more susceptible to damage- specifically sun-damage- when wet, and second, your hair is more malleable when wet, which of course is the operative principle behind hair-curlers.

Your hair can be freely and easily bent into different shapes when wet, and as the hair subsequently dries, the strands contract, and the cuticle-plates close up and tightly overlap again, locking the strands into their new shape. And that’s why my Helmet-Head so stubbornly persists until I can get my head back under a shower.

There’s of course an easy solution to my dilemma: a buzz cut. Many cyclists have short/buzzed/shave heads, thereby wonderfully avoiding the stylistic angst of Helmet-Head. But I’m fundamentally reluctant to do so, not out of vanity, but out of… well, let me try to explain…

Say you knew someone who was a total natural-born athlete. Some who was strong, agile, fast, with superb endurance, balance and eye-hand coordination. Now if that person just spent all day on the couch watching TV and eating Cheetoes, wouldn’t we all agree what a tremendous waste of potential that was?

That’s the deal with my hair. Because really, when you get down to it, I am a Natural Hair Athlete. I’m 46 years old, probably 80% of my friends are bald/balding/receding, but my hair is fantastically thick and healthy. Wouldn’t it be a crime- a waste of natural talent even- to buzz-cut that mane?

After I got to the office, changed, and checked email/voicemail, I walked over to the break-room for a cup of coffee. A female coworker- let’s call her “Karen”- was there and I said hi. She turned to me, and- I swear to God I am not making this up- said, “Hey your hair looks great! Did you do something different?”

And you know what? She was totally serious.

Note about sources: Info on the evolution of “hairlessness” and dark skin pigment in humans came from here. Info on the evolution and origins of hair came from here. General info on the structure of hair came from here, here, and here. Info on the fiber-optic/UV transmitting properties of hair came from here. Additional info on hair, hair evolution, and specifically vellus hair came from Wikipedia.

We Apologize For The Interruption Of Service

Thanks again Phil, Kevin and Mark for an outstanding Guest Week. If I just had a few dozen more regular guest-posters, this project would be a piece of cake!

Yes, I’m back. But I was home for only about 12 hours. I’m on the road for work*, and then out of the country for a week. So while I’ve got lots to blog about from Mexico, it’ll be a few, maybe several, days before I can post. But I assure you that when I do post, I’ll have great stuff about birds, trees and an extended tangent about bribery and law enforcement personnel**. So hang tight.

*Actually a combined work/boondoggle, but that’s another story, for probably 3 or 4 posts down the road.

**Arguably my Best. Teaser. Ever.

In the meantime, just to share a couple of glimpses of my weird, hectic life, in the past 10 days I’ve gone from this:

…to this:

…to this*.

*Yup. That’s the boondoggle part.

I Like February

No, I don’t have a real post. I’m just goofing around today.

I’m always happy when February comes around. Part of this is probably just where it sits on the calendar. Only 2 months till April! Soon there’ll be birds and bugs and flowers and everything else. The days are longer now, and with the sun higher, the world doesn’t seem so harshly divided between glaring light and dark shadow; it’s like there are colors again. The inversions seem to ease up, and it’s not quite so cold as it was just a month ago; almost every day breaks freezing now.

Winter has finally become kind of pleasant the last week or so. The recent storms have cleaned the gunk out of the air, and put down enough snow that skiing is fun again.

Tangent: And that’s important, especially right now. Because one downside of Utah in late January and February is that, living here, you are exposed firsthand to a whole bunch of really, really, really crazy people. Oh no, I don’t mean that Utahns are crazier than folks anywhere else- every state has its share of crazies. But here in Utah, for 6 weeks every winter, we pull together several dozen of the most absolutely wacky, living-on-another-planet, bat-shit-craziest people from all over the state, put them all together in one building and then broadcast them on TV every night. We call this group the “State Legislature”, and it’s absolutely critical that you avoid watching the evening news during this period, lest you freak out, abandon your house and move out of state.

Last week, someone asked me- not for the first time- if I could ever see myself moving to [THE NORTHEASTERN STATE WHERE MY NEW EMPLOYER IS HEADQUARTERED]. Whenever someone asks me that, I always think the same thing: “This person does not know anything about me or my values.” I try to explain it sometimes, but it never gets across. People just have to “get” it for themselves.

Fortunately for them, I now have a helmet-cam. Here’s what I saw yesterday morning at 8:13AM. At 2 seconds the view pans to the right and down Big Cottonwood Canyon clear out to the Salt Lake Valley. 20,000 years ago a glacier filled this canyon, and spilled about a kilometer past its mouth, where it (presumably) calved off icebergs into the ~700 – 1,000 ft deep lake that filled the valley bottom. At 8 seconds the view turns to the left, toward the sun breaking through the hoar-frosted aspens.

At 9:03AM I walked into the office. There’s no other million+ person metro area in the US where you can pull that off. That almost- almost- makes up for having Orrin Hatch as your senator.

No I’m not posting the whole ~15 minute descent. But here’s a quick 30-second stretch about 5 minutes down the mountain that gives you a feel for the terrain.

Lastly (in a lame effort to add some minimal science value to an otherwise wholly frivolous post) I’ve mentioned before about the odd lack of pines in the Wasatch, and how one really noticeable exception is the stand of planted Ponderosas directly across from the entrance to The Spruces campground/ parking area. In this clip I glide alongside them, pointing my pole up and at them as I pass by. This one’s just for tree geeks, but I thought the light through the trees was kind of pretty. I let the clip* continue down to the road so you’d know just how close to the road the stand is.

*Sorry about the herky-jerky. Goggle-strap wasn’t tight enough, and the cam bounced a bit as I skied over some stutter-bumps.

The cool thing about doing something like this before work is that even if the work-day turns out kinda-sorta-sucky*, the day is still wonderful.

*And it was.

A Thousand Hidden Places

Saturday SkiBikeJunkie and I did a ski tour from Big Cottonwood up and over into Mill Creek. The temps were warm- about 30F when we started skinning up from the Spruces trailhead at 9AM, and after the cold snaps of the past couple of weeks the weather felt almost balmy. Our route took us along Mill D North, up and over Tom’s Hill into the drainage behind, up the East ridge of Reynolds to the peak, down through the West-side glades, back up and over to Dog Lake, up to the top of Little Water Peak, a minor (9,500 ft) knob rising above the surrounding aspen forest.

At some point along the way SBJ said something that, despite having tramped around the Wasatch for over a decade, never really occurred to me before. He said that one tends to think of the canyons of the Wasatch as big, parallel drainages, but that they’re really more like a hub & spoke system, and when you get up to the “hub” everything sort of comes together and the drainages all meet up. I don’t know why I’d never thought of it before- I’ve transited the “hub” many times by bike and ski, but I still tended to think of the canyons as “parallel lines”.

From Little Water Peak we surveyed possible routes down into Mill Creek. Finally agreeing on the best choice, we de-skinned*, dropped into the aspens, and threaded our way down into the canyon.

*Take your climbing skins off your skis. Just in case any non-skiers are reading.

Backcountry skiing is fun in general, but I like tree-skiing best of all. Part of it is the fun of line-finding through the trees, part of it is the soft powder protected from mountain winds. But I think what I like best about tree-skiing is the constant sense of discovery. Unlike a bowl or open slope, you can’t see what’s ahead; the path through the glades reveals itself to you as it happens. You can’t know the run, or even image it until you actually experience it.

Tree-routes reveal themselves bit by bit. A glade rolls, constricts, pinches out, and then a quick dark tunnel between tighter trees leads to an opening, leading to another opening, which in turn leads to another glade you never knew was there, never entered before, and which maybe, quite possibly, you’ll never pass through again.

What’s interesting about these glades is that although you could theoretically visit any of them in Summer on foot, in practice you never would. They’re filled with waist-to-chest-high undergrowth, and though a trail may pass within a half-mile or less, you’d probably never bushwhack your way to them. (Pic left = Aspen forest in June.) And that’s the irony of the hub & spoke model: the closer to the “hub” of the Wasatch you get, the more the world around is filled with secret little hidden- almost unreachable- places.

But snow- that strange season-long blanket of frozen water- somehow opens up paths into these secret places, letting you glide in and out of hidden glades you’d never reach otherwise. And after you leave it blows and snows your tracks away, making those places secret again.

Here’s a couple of minutes of helmet-cam video during our descent into Mill Creek. But before I show it, I need to set expectations. The web is chock-full of exciting, amazing, Warren Miller-esque ski videos. Mine are not like those. There are several reasons for this, foremost of which is that I am an exceedingly lame skier*. In fact, most of my ski runs go something like this:

*Certainly, my lame-ness is compounded by my misguided use of free-heel gear, a pointless, multi-year, granola-esque undertaking which I intend to rectify shortly.

No, this won’t be exciting; it’s just weaving between widely-spaced trees in deep, soft powder. But it gives the sense I was describing a moment ago of one glade leading to openings, to choices, to other glades, to little mysteries and hidden places continually being revealed, while other glades, openings not followed, remain hidden, secret and unknown.

Tangent: I once read this great sci-fi/fantasy book about a haunted forest. It was this old stretch of primeval English woods that was all thick and overgrown and almost impossible to penetrate. But if you paid careful attention and were patient and persistent, you could gradually find pathways that led to other pathways which could gradually take you deeper into the forest, revealing its mysteries. Backcountry tree-skiing sometimes makes me think of that story.

Eventually, like all tree-runs, ours funneled us into a ravine, through which we teased and cajoled our way down. Sometimes the going was smooth…

Other times tricky…

But eventually we popped out on the snow-packed road and coasted and skated our way down. As we descended we started to encounter people again- infrequently at first, then a steady current- all sorts of folks, looking mostly happy amid the bright sun, blue sky and above-inversion-level air. Having slalomed our way earlier through trees, we now slalomed our way through XC skiers, snowshoers and dog-walkers back to the gate and the waiting car.

Probably one of the most overused analogies for life is how it’s like a journey. And though carpet-worn, we like life-as-a-journey analogies because, to a certain extent, they work. We start somewhere, go someplace, and wind up somewhere else. But most journeys aren’t like life. When we drive to Vegas or Reno or Denver, we know how far it is, how long the trip we’ll take, and what road we’ll take to get there. When we go for a ride on the Shoreline or Mid-Mountain Trail, we know there’s a clear, intended trail for us to follow.

But with tree-skiing, the life-as-a-journey analogy makes more sense. When we ski down through a forest in the backcountry, although we pick a direction and have an approximate destination in mind, we don’t really know what path we’ll take down, exactly where we’ll end up, or quite when we’ll get there. At each junction, each glade, we make our best choice, which in turn leads to other openings and other choices, and yet ends other possibilities at the same time. After we’ve gone a ways, we may start to see a pattern, and our route as a whole may even make some sense, but we can’t see that pattern until we’re most of the way down. Sometimes, part-way down, we realize we made a poor choice early on, but it’s no good to just stop and sulk in the forest for long; we look around, pick the best next opening, and ski on.

3 Cool Things About Lodgepole In The Uintas

I’ve blogged a few times about winter-escapes from the valley, and most of these are pointed South, and less often, West. But a couple of times a year I go East.

The next range to the East of the Wasatch is the Uintas. I think I’ve only mentioned this range a couple of times, probably last summer when blogging about a couple of bike races that pass through it. That’s a shame, because the Uintas are a spectacular range in their own right, and despite their neighbor-status, are very different from the Wasatch.

The first, and most obvious, difference is their topography. The Uintas are one of only a handful of Great Basin mountain ranges (out of ~200) that run East-West. And unlike the Wasatch, they feature real, honest-to-goodness, rolling, forested foothills.

Tangent: The other nearby- but far less well-known- East-West range is the Raft Rivers, up in Northwest Utah along the Idaho border. Though many of the lower “trails” in this range are thoroughly ATV-trashed, the upper reaches of the range are seldom visited and make for wonderful hiking, with a combination of pleasant forest and wide-open rolling grassy slopes that lead up to a a couple of long crests with views clear down to the Newfoundland Mountains and beyond.

The Raft Rivers also feature the most extensive, pure woodlands of Curlleaf Mountain Mahogany I’ve hiked through. The range is beyond the Northern and Western limits of the range of Gambel Oak, thus lending support to my what-if “theory” about Cercocarpus that I went on about last summer.

Because of its foothills and its proximity to Salt Lake, the Western end of the Uintas attracts XC skiers. The Wasatch is great for “up & down” skiing, but most XC is confined to snowed-under roads. But the Western Uintas feature a series of rolling, forested trails in the 7,000 – 8,000 foot range that make for nice, long XC ski tours.

But the other big difference between the Uintas and the Wasatch is the trees. The Uintas have pines. Not just isolated, occasional pines along the rocky crests, but true pine forests, something we never get in here the Wasatch.

When you drive up into the Uintas along Mirror Lake Highway the first pine you’ll notice is Ponderosa (pic right), plenty of them, along the highway. But the Ponderosas in the Western Uintas are planted, mostly back in the 1930’s or so, and sure enough, if you hike, bike, ski or snowshoe away from the highway for more than a couple hundred yards in any direction, the Ponderosas disappear, and what you’re left travelling through is a native pine of the this range, Lodgepole Pine, Pinus contorta.

Tangent: The Eastern end of the Uintas does support native Ponderosa, the origins of which- according to Professor Chuck- were the subject of much disagreement among botanists for many years. But that’s another story.

Lodgepole (pic left) is one of the most common pines in Western North America. It’s one of only 2 native 2-needled pines in Utah, the other being Colorado Piñon, Pinus edulis, and the 2 are a cinch to tell apart. Lodgepoles grow arrow-straight in dense mountain forests, while Colorado Piñons grow twisted trunks in semi-desert woodlands. I can’t think of anyplace the two trees grow anywhere near each other.

There are so many interesting things to blog about Lodgepoles, including their role in periodic fires, their (sometimes) serotinous cones (pic right = non-serotinous cone), and the hardships they’ve suffered in recent decades at the hands of bark beetles, but for this post I’m going to selfishly zero in on the three things that make Lodgepoles most interesting to me.

3 Cool Things

The first is extremely self-focused; when I go to ski a trail like North Fork or Norway Flat, I’m visiting the closest pine forest to Salt Lake. For years I lived in Colorado, and hiked, biked and skied in pine forests almost daily, taking pines for granted. And though the PLT forests of the Wasatch are wonderful, they like that certain something of a pine forest. Pine forests are lighter than spruce-fir forests, with a special kind of filtered sunlight you don’t get in any other kind of forest. And then the smell. Even in Winter, when the direct sun hits a snow-free patch of needle-covered ground, the resinous scent instantly takes me back 15 years to the sunny forests of the Colorado Front Range.

Pine forest lines-of-sight are freer and more open than in PLT forest, creating a sense of being able to see things clearly a couple of hundred yards away while still shaded and “sheltered” by the forest, something you rarely experience in a dark Wasatch PLT forest. And in this sense, the Lodgepole forests of the Uintas feel like my quickest, easiest escape to someplace that is somehow really different, which brings me to the 2^nd cool thing…

All About The Boreal Forest

Botanists divide the forests of North America into a few different types. Different books define these types variously, but almost all sources define the forests here in Utah and Colorado as something like “Rocky Mountain Montane Forest.” With a few exceptions, most of the forested places I’ve blogged about fall into this category. Another type is “Sierra Montane Forest” which I blogged about last summer during our Tahoe Vacation. Each of these, and another type, Northwest Coastal Forest, covers huge areas of Western North America, and varies considerably over its respective range. But the most extensive Western Forest of all is the most Northerly, the Boreal Forest.

The Boreal Forest stretches across Canada from Labrador to the Canadian coastal ranges and up into Southern Nunavut and the Alaskan Interior. It’s a vast, dark, cold forest, constituted by just a handful of tree species. The Northern 2/3 is dominated by Spruce (White and Black) and Larch, but the Southern 1/3 comprises North America’s most extensive pine forest, a broad, trans-continental swathe of Pines, dominated by Lodgepole in the West, and its close cousin Jack Pine, Pinus banksiana, to the East.

And I should mention that the North American Boreal Forest is just a part of a broader, circumpolar Boreal forest that rings the entire Northern hemisphere. Clear across Siberia, the Urals, Scandinavia, the vast Boreal forest continues, albeit with slightly different species. (The most common Eurasian-Boreal pine is our old friend Scots Pine, Pinus sylvestris.)

Lodgepole spans well beyond the Boreal Forest, down the spines of the Rockies and the Sierra, and into the Northwest coastal forests of Washington and British Columbia. But its stronghold, its base, its home is the mighty Boreal North, and its presence in these Southern forests are extensions from that stronghold.

Tangent: Lodgepole has also been introduced in many areas outside of North America, including Europe, South America, and most importantly, New Zealand. Naturalized Lodgepoles have created extensive forests in New Zealand, which have, sadly, out-competed and pushed aside forests of native trees.

I blogged a couple weeks ago about how the desert of Southern Arizona is really more of a fringe of the true Sonoran desert. While the forests of the Uintas can’t really be characterized as Boreal, their Lodgepoles represent the southernmost extension of Lodgepole into Utah and the Great Basin. If you drive just 50 or 100 miles North, they’re all over the place; Lodgepole is the most common tree in Wyoming. When you hike in Yellowstone, or the Tetons, or the Wind Rivers, you’re hiking in Lodgepole. But here in Utah, they end in the Uintas, and their presence always seems like- if not quite a “fringe”- then perhaps an echo of the vast Boreal Forest to the North, and I often return home from a day in the Uintas with thoughts of caribou, permafrost and taiga in my head…

Side Note: Lodgepole does occur a bit further South in Utah, in isolated stands up to ~30 miles South of the Uintas, but nevermore- to my knowledge- in real forests. Outside of Utah it extends significantly further South. Along the Colorado Front range it reaches clear down and into Northern New Mexico, and in the Sierra it pops up- after a ~250 mile break- in the San Gabriel Mountains continues in isolated mountain pockets even into extreme Northern Baja. These SoCal-Baja stands are almost certainly remnants from Lodgepole’s more southerly Ice Age range. But here in the Great Basin, the, Uintas mark Lodgepole’s effective Southern limit.

The third cool thing about Lodgepole is its story of post-glacial dispersal and evolution. Depending on who’s counting, there are between 3 and 6 subspecies of Lodgepole. For this post, I’ll go with 4, since I’ve seen 3 of them, and the 4^th is pretty well-accepted. Here in the Rockies, the Lodgepoles are all P. contorta latifolia, which extends North along the Canadian Rockies into the Yukon and clear to Alaska.

Over in the Sierra is P. contorta murrayana, (pic below, left)which, though slow-growing, is the stoutest and most impressive of the subspecies. In the Northwest, and extending up along the coast into the Alaska panhandle is P. contorta contorta, and the 4^th race, P. contorta bolanderi, or Bolander Pine, is a dwarf subspecies which grows only on the terraces behind Mendocino. Awesome Wife and I visited Bolander Pine last June; it’s the only pine in the world with no resin canals in its needles.

The reason for all these subspecies is that that Lodgepoles survived the last ice age in several different refugia (ice-free areas.) Traditionally it was assumed that our latifolia survived in the Southern Rockies, but recent genetic research indicates that it may have survived in 2 or possibly 3 distinct refugia. The first, less controversial, 2 were in the Southern Rockies, and then somewhere closer to home here in the Great Basin. The 3^rd, more questionable, refuge may have actually been up in the Yukon, where a population may have survived the last glacial period either in an ice-free, glacier-surrounded range, or an ice-free area North of the ice sheet.

Murrayana survived somewhere way South along the Sierra-to-coastal mountain spine of California, probably down in Baja, where those remnant stands persist today.

But contorta’s story is also fascinating; it appears to have survived in 2 distinct refugia. The first was almost certainly along the Pacific coast South of the ice. But the second appears to have been some kind of a “Pine Atlantis”, in that it was located somewhere West of the ice, out on part of the continental shelf which later became submerged as the ice sheets melted and sea levels rose a few hundred feet.

Lastly, bolanderii is mostly closely-related to contorta, and appears be a recent adaption to local soil conditions.

This whole, 20,000-30,000 year saga is but a blip within a greater evolutionary story, the speciation of Jack Pine and Lodgepole. These species are still closely related enough to create fully-fertile hybrids where they meet up in Alberta and Nunavut, and seem to have diverged sometime in the last couple of million years, during the last “Ice Age”.

Let’s Define “Ice Age”

The term “Ice Age” gets thrown around pretty liberally. When most of us hear or use it, we’re thinking about the last “glacial period”, which peaked about 18,000 years ago, when Salt Lake City was under 1,100 feet of water (Lake Bonneville) and Manhattan was under about a mile of ice. But before that, maybe around 50,000 years ago, was another, largely “ice-free” interglacial period like today, and before that was another glacial period, and so on and so on clear back for the last 2.5 million years. This 2.5 million year-long stretch is the real “Ice Age”, and it appears to have been (and still be) the 3^rd major “Ice Age” over the last billion years.

Over the course of this current “Ice Age”, the original Lodgepole-Jack Pine ancestor species was sundered repeatedly by advancing ice sheets into Eastern and Western populations, leaving us with the two closely-related species of two-needled, Boreal pine we have today.

This multi-level, drawn-out evolutionary epic, with its various sub-plots and lost refugia and delayed reunions, reads almost like a soap opera, and as I think back on so many of the other evolutionary stories I’ve blogged about- White Fir and Joshua Trees and Scrub Oak and Moose and Cougars and Dandelions and Black-Headed Grosbeaks and House Finches- it occurs to me that so many of those read like soap operas as well. And it’s this soap opera/telenovela-like aspect of evolution that makes Lodgepole such a great set-up for my next post.

Next-Up: My Obligatory (If Belated) Charles Darwin Birthday Post

It’s Called “Limber” For A Reason

Saturday I had a full day of backcountry skiing with Organic Chemistry Rick (guy who never reads my blog) and Clean Colin.

Tangent: Actually it was only skiing for OC Rick and me; Clean Colin is a snow-boarder, and he takes a split-board into the backcountry. A split-board is a diabolically clever contraption that looks like a normal snowboard, except that it comes apart, or “splits” longitudinally into two separate boards. The bindings disconnect from the standard snowboard position and reconnect into a ski-binding-like position on either piece of the board. The boarder applies mohair skins to the two pieces and ascends the slope like a backcountry skier. At the top, he/she removes the 2 pieces, reassembles the board, and reinstalls the bindings. At the bottom of the run, the process is repeated and reversed.

The downside of the whole split-board methodology is that it is huge equipment dick-dance, requiring a speedy, non-trivial, MacGyver-like disassembly/reassembly process, with various cables and clamps, not once, but two times for every run. Clean Colin does the routine as smoothly as any boarder I’ve seen; nonetheless, it makes me tired just watching.

Nested Tangent: One of my big regrets from the 80’s is that I didn’t watch more MacGyver. I think I caught a total of about 5 episodes. My favorite (and least plausible?) was the one where he was being held captive in this big storage tent in the jungle camp of a South American drug lord, and escapes by building an airplane out of spare parts he finds in the tent. I can still remember him looking around, looking real thoughtful, like, “OK, let’s see… I’ve got a lawn-mower, some plywood, a coil of rope, and a Betamax VCR… hmm… What could I do with this stuff?...” Loved that show.

We skied/boarded in an area known as Meadow Chutes, a series of parallel Northeast-facing runs in a side drainage on the South side of Big Cottonwood Canyon. For the most part the trees in this area are standard Wasatch fare: Tall Englemann Spruce in the bottom of the drainage, and stands of Douglas Fir mixed with large swathes of Aspen on the sunnier slopes. All of the runs in Meadow Chutes are accessed from a common ridgeline, and this ridgeline is treed with a mix of Douglas Fir, and our old friend, Limber Pine, Pinus flexilis.

Tangent: The Douglas Firs on this ridge have the largest cones, up to 3.5” long, of any I’ve come across in the Wasatch (pic right).

I’ve blogged about Limber Pine before, focusing mainly on its fascinating co-evolutionary history with Corvids, and its range and presence in the Wasatch. But I haven’t talked about one of its interesting and unique characteristics- the flexibility, or “limber-ness” for which it is named.

As I’ve mentioned previously, Limber Pine in the Wasatch tends to occur up on high, exposed ridgelines, and these are places that see plenty of snow and vicious winds throughout the winter. Oftentimes Limber Pine grows where other trees can’t grow, or if they do grow in such places, the grow up all gnarled and misshapen. But Limber Pine seems to do fine in such spots, and the reason is its namesake flexibility. Limber Pine is the most flexible real tree in Utah. You can take any branch of 2 fingers or less diameter and bend it 90+ degrees without breaking, as I did in this video. You can bend any branch/twig of 1 finger or less diameter and bend it clear back on itself (net 180 degrees) as I did in this video.

Tangent: OC Rick has zero patience for my screwing out with tree videos/experiments on powder days. (Actually, OC Rick has zero patience for anything other than climbing and skiing on a powder day. He doesn’t stop to eat, drink, pee or anything. The guy is a backcountry machine. Every ski day with OC Rick is a Powder Jihad. If we don’t finish the day with at least 6,000 vertical feet, he returns to the car mildly grumpy and sour.) To get these videos, I had to kick it into high gear on one of our yo-yo climbs, and outpace him returning up our skin-track, which gave me the necessary 3-4 minute window to make these videos.

Try this trick with any other tree in the Wasatch, and you’ll just snap it off. In fact, you can sometimes even tie a Limber Pine twig in a knot, as I almost did in this home video later that evening (videography courtesy of Bird Whisperer.)

This flexibility means that Limber Pine limbs can bend and sway in high winds, then rebound to their normal position without breaking. It also enables these limbs to bend under the weight of heavy snow, rather than stiffly fighting the weight till they snap. And this bending not only eases strain; by drooping the limbs actually shed excess snow. In fact, though you’ll often see snow-loaded spruces, firs and Douglas Firs following a storm in the Wasatch, you’ll almost never find a Limber Pine with more than a dusting of snow on its boughs.

How It Works

The 2 most common substances in plants are cellulose and lignin. Cellulose is present in all plants, as well as green algae, and is the most common organic substance in the world. Cotton is about 90% cellulose; most wood is more like ½ cellulose.

Lignin is present in all woody plants, and is the substance that strengthens plant tissue. Without lignin, plants can only “stand up” via water pressure in their tissues. If an Arrowleaf Balsamroot, or a Glacier Lily or a Tulip gets dried up, it wilts. If an Oak or Maple or Spruce dies of thirst (technically a xylem-embolism) it remains standing, a dead snag.

Geeky Chemistry Deep-End

Tangent: There are no animal enzymes capable of breaking down either cellulose or lignin. Specifically, cellulose consists of a long chain of glucose “units” connected to one another by a type of linkage called a beta acetal.

An acetal is any molecule with 2 oxygen atoms attached to the same carbon atom. A beta acetal is an acetal where the 2 oxygen atoms are attached to the same side of the carbon atom. There is no animal enzyme known that can break down the beta acetal bond between glucose units in cellulose.

Nested tangent: Interestingly though, there are animal enzymes capable of breaking down beta acetal bonds in other organic molecules, the best example being lactase, which breaks the beta acetal bonds in lactose. Animals (including people) that produce lactase can digest lactose, and therefore milk.

Animals that “digest” cellulose or lignin, such as sheep, horses and termites, do so with the assistance of bacteria living in their guts. These bacteria produce enzymes capable of breaking the beta acetal bonds in question.

We’ve already talked about the Standard Wood Architecture and some of the basic plant tissue types, such as xylem (moves water) and phloem (moves sugars.) There are a few other types we haven’t looked at yet, and one of these is collenchyma. The primary function of collenchyma cells is to provide structural support for the plant. These cells have thick, tough, lignin-rich walls that are extra thick at their corners, so that many of them fit together firmly, like bricks in a wall. Obviously collenchyma cells are present in wood, but their also present in non-woody tissues that need a little stiffening, like leaf-stalks.

But the wood of Limber Pine is different. Its collenchyma cells occur in long, thin bands, and are elongated, thin-walled, and lignin-poor. The cells occur in strands throughout the wood rather than as a solid cylinder in the middle of the stem, as is typical in woody plants. This allows them provide support, while leaving the wood flexible.

Limber Pines area small minority of PLTs in the Wasatch, but they’re easy to recognize. They typically occur on exposed ridgelines or by rocky outcrops. From a distance they’re distinctly bushy-looking compared to the surrounding spires of spruce and fir, and close-up they’re the only conifer in the Wasatch with needles in bunches of 5. They’re accessible in all of Big/Little Cottonwood ski areas. Next time you come across one, try tying a twig in a knot.

Skiing Through Aspen, And All About Photosynthetic Bark

This past weekend was my first real backcountry ski day of the season, by which I mean not just going to a resort or skinning up Porter Fork or Mill Creek, but a real backcountry ski day, where you pack beacon & shovel, skin up a couple thousand feet and yo-yo ski several runs, while trying not to get killed in an avalanche.

Ski Tangent: I do 3 types of skiing: resort (mainly with family), XC (mainly in the Uintas) and backcountry. My backcountry setup includes nice wide skis (Volkl Snowrangers) and heavy plastic boots (Garmont Liberos). I use skins with these skis to ascend slopes, and I spend most of my time on telemark skis between 7,500 and 9,500 feet, ascending into a suitable area- usually somewhere up Big Cottonwood Canyon- where I can yo-yo ski several runs. The initial descent usually entails the grueling job of breaking a “skin-track” up; successive ascents on the same track take only maybe ½ the effort. I usually do this with friends, but sometimes solo as well. Despite being on telemark skis, nearly all of my turns are alpine turns, but I like the low-weight and flexible boots of telemark gear, both for climbing as well as picking/stepping my way out of brushy or problematic areas.

This type of skiing is by far the most dangerous of the 3. It requires safety gear (beacon, shovel, probe), knowledge of snow conditions, caution and good sense. Different backcountry skiers take different approaches to avalanche safety. Some are virtual “snow scientists”; run into them on the skin-track and they’ll talk you into a daze with details of crystal formation and snow compaction. Other skiers focus more on safety gear (i.e. Avalung) while still others focus primarily on slope, terrain and anchor points. I use a 4^th strategy that encompasses elements of all of these and other techniques and which I refer to as Being A Total Pussy. That’s right, I am a total pussy in the backcountry. None of us knows how we’ll go, but I am determined not to spend my final minutes suffocating under snow. I stick to shallow-angle slopes, in the trees, under all but the most benign conditions.

Organic-Chemistry-Rick (guy who never reads my blog), our friend Jane, and I skinned up into the Beartrap drainage on the North side of big Cottonwood Canyon (map above, right), and despite the abysmal weather (super-cold, high winds) and fairly meager early-season snow cover, found some great snow and had a good day.

Science Fiction Tangent: I have a weak spot for end-of-the-world, Armageddon-type movies. The weekend before last, when Awesome Wife was away, I watched “I Am Legend”, which is set in the ruins of a post-plague New York City. The movie’s real eerie, because the protagonist is driving and exploring all around this abandoned, overgrown city, which of of course used to be all busy and bustling with activity.

That’s the same feeling I get the first backcountry ski day of the season. It’s always the first return to the high backcountry that I last saw in Summer or Fall, and often the exact same hillsides I hiked or biked just months ago (for example on this tour we were skiing within 100 yards or so of the Wasatch Crest trail.) But where there were leaves and flowers and birds and crickets and all kinds of great smells the last time I was here, now there’s just silence, wind and bare trees. In the early winter, this “ruins” feel is exacerbated by the dead shrubs sticking out of the snowpack. Recognize this guy? (pic left) It’s the remains of a Cow Parsnip stalk, Heracleum maximum, it’s double composite flower-head architecture still clear in death.

We skied several runs through an Aspen forest. I’ve gone on previously about the beauty of Aspen forests in both Summer and Fall, but in the Winter they have yet another kind of beauty- ghostly, quiet and open, and this winter beauty has a weird, almost otherworldly quality to it. If you’ve ever read C.S. Lewis’ “The Magician’s Nephew”, Aspen forests in winter somehow remind me of the “Wood Between The Worlds”, which isn’t really part of any world, but leads to all worlds.

On a more mundane level, Aspen forests offer the best tree-skiing in the Wasatch. They’re open, nicely-spaced, with no winter-foliage to prevent snowfall from reaching the forest floor. Remember the tree-rule of backcountry skiing: break the up-track through PLTs, but ski down through Aspens.

Aspens in the Wasatch almost always reproduce clonally, and so there’s a good chance we spent the bulk of the day skiing inside a single clone. As we repeatedly re-ascended our skin-track, I had plenty of time to think about what these trees are doing in Winter.

Back in the summer when I first blogged about Aspen, I went on and on about their genetics, evolution and foliage, but I glossed over 2 of the most remarkable things about this tree. The first is that it is so ALONE. Think about it: as you hike, ski, bike, or just drive through the Wasatch, away from the creeks, there’s only 1 deciduous real tree in the mountains- Aspen. Everything else is a PLT or maybe a Mountain Mahogany or a Rocky Mountain Juniper. And what’s more, is Aspen stands alone clear across Northern/Northwestern North America. Go up to Montana, or Idaho, or down to New Mexico, or clear up to the Yukon, stay away from the streamside stuff, and know what the only deciduous tree you’ll find is? That’s right, Aspen. And there’s more! Zip across the Bering Strait and start cruising across the boreal forests of Siberia, and there’s pretty much just one deciduous, non-riparian, tree alongside the Pines and PLTs of the Russian North- Eurasian Aspen, Populus tremula.

And this alone-ness segues directly into the 2^nd remarkable thing about Aspen: its competitiveness. Aspens in the Wasatch and elsewhere are surrounded by conifers (PLTs here, PLTs + Pines elsewhere.) Every Spring, while the Aspens waste valuable weeks growing new leaves, the conifers, with their needles ready, start photosynthesizing and growing. As soon as the temps bust 50F, they’re kicking it. How do Aspens compete?

One way of course, we’ve already talked about: they spread clonally and quickly, taking advantage of disturbances such as avalanches, forest fires and clear-cuts. But it turns out that Aspen has another trick to compete with the PLTs: photosynthetic bark.

When we think of chlorophyll, we think of leaves. (See this post for some basic info on chlorophyll, and an overview of the symbiotic evolution of chloroplasts.) But more than 60 species of tree and woody shrub have been found to contain substantial amounts of chlorophyll in their bark. Of all of them, Aspen is the champion, with more chlorophyll in its bark than any other tree known. The bark-chlorophyll in Aspen is concentrated in a super-thin layer (about the thickness of a leaf) that lies within 1mm of the exterior surface of the bark. (The exterior layer is called the periderm. When you brush your hand against an Aspen trunk, that white powder that comes off is dead periderm cells.)

The photosynthetic layer comprises less than 5% of the total volume of bark on the tree, but it accounts for a whopping 17-40% of all the tree’s chlorophyll when the tree is fully leaved. The bark-chlorophyll is most heavily concentrated on the upper, South-facing trunks.

Tangent: At this point an astute reader may be thinking, “Ah-ha! That’s why I sometimes see Aspen trunks that have a greenish tinge. That must be bark-chlorophyll.” To which the answer is “Yes, but…” The greenish tinge of the bark of some Aspens does indeed indicate the presence of chlorophyll. But a greenish tinge doesn’t necessarily mean that a given tree has more chlorophyll than an Aspen with pure white bark. The whiter Aspen may just have more dead periderm cells on/in its bark.

The presence of chlorophyll in its bark appears to help Aspen in a couple of ways. First it provides a photosynthetic head-start in Springtime, before its new leaves have developed. This appears to be especially important in younger Aspen, and it negates at least some of the early-season photosynthetic advantage enjoyed by neighboring PLTs. Even during the summer, bark chlorophyll accounts for 10%-15% of all photosynthetic activity in a typical Aspen.

But the second way bark chlorophyll helps Aspen is in utilizing or “refixing” CO2 given off by the tree. Even in winter, trees continue to respire, and as they do so, lose CO2. Bark-chlorophyll is able to recapture some of this CO2 through photosynthesis, which in turn helps create a more aerobic environment inside the tree which helps defend against certain fungal infections.

Lastly, bark-chlorophyll may help Aspen- even in summer- in times of drought-induced stress. The stomata (pores) in leaves respond to drought by closing, which in turn stops any photosynthesis. But bark is able to continue exchanging gases- and thereby continue photosynthesis- through structures called lenticels, which show up as the horizontal lines on Aspen bark (though lenticels are in no way unique to Aspen.)

Tangent: Of course the type of photosynthesis we’re talking about in Aspen is the “standard”, C3 photosynthesis. But we’ve already seen that there’s at least one other photosynthetic process, C4 photosynthesis, which we talked about way back during Weed Week (man, was that a cool week or what?) when we looked at Crabgrass. And it turns out that there’s another (yes a third!) type of photosynthesis that actually functions while the stomata are closed. I’m hoping to visit a number of plants that employ this third type of photosynthesis sometime in the next 60-90 days, but in the meantime I’ll give you a quick hint: This week, UTRider is surrounded by plants that use this third type of photosynthesis.

I’ve been skiing, biking and hiking in Aspens for nearly 2 decades, and they never cease to fascinate me. When I first encountered them, it was their visual and sonic beauty that caught my attention. As I’ve gotten to know them better I’ve become awed by their elegance, engineering and sophistication. Aspens are way cool.