Montana Part 2: Columbian Forest, Overthrusts and Pro-Glacial Lakes

Last week, the day before we left on vacation, I spoke with a coworker who was on vacation up in Western Washington State. She complained that it had rained her entire vacation- the first real rainy week during an otherwise abnormally sunny Puget Sound Summer. I made an appropriate sympathetic response, but didn’t really give it much thought. I should have. When we arrived in Whitefish 2 days later, the same front reached us. For 72 hours, the mercury never cracked 55F, and our hikes and explorations each day were at least partly in the rain. We made the best of it, but a number of activities we’d planned- such as swimming in Whitefish Lake- were off the table. We’ll come back to this topic- rain- in a moment.

Quick Glacier NP Geology

Anybody who knows anything about Glacier National Park knows that one of the things that make it super-cool is its outstanding mountain scenery, which of course is a result of its awesome geology and repeated glaciations. The mountains of Glacier NP are formed as a results of a geological action called the Lewis Overthrust, in which, due to the collision of 2 tectonic plates over the past 170 million years, a huge chunk of rock- hundreds of miles long and a couple of miles thick- has been pushed 50 miles to the East up and over underlying, newer layers of rock. This means that the rocks that compose the Lewis and Livingstone Ranges- the 2 principal ranges of Glacier NP- are nearly 1.5 billion years older than the rocks underneath them!

That would be cool enough in itself, but over the last couple million years, they’ve been buried, scoured, eroded and carved repeatedly by ice sheets up to a mile thick, resulting in the fantastic scenery today. Everywhere you go in Glacier, you’re smacked in the face with this rich geological/glacial history: Cirques, moraines, arêtes and U-shaped valleys that drain out into spectacular cascading waterfalls.

Tangent: 2 weeks ago Clean Colin visited Glacier. Before we left I asked him on a scale of 1-10 how spectacular the scenery was. For reference I asked him to assume that the Wasatch was a “4”, and Banff was a “10”. He said “8 or 9”. He was dead on. The place is absolutely stunning.

Some Stuff About Glaciers

Side Note: I considered doing a post on glaciers in the park. I don’t think I’ll be able to fit it in, but here are some interesting highlights. There are 26 glaciers in the park, all rapidly receding. In 1850- when the glaciers were first mapped- there were at least 150 glaciers. By 2030, there are expected to be 0.

Obviously this is both disappointing from a scenery standpoint and disturbing as an indicator of climate change. But the numbers, dramatic as they are, are perhaps just a titch misleading in the bigger picture. 1850 was roughly coincident with the end of the Little Ice Age, a period of global cooling from about 1500AD to 1850 which saw the freezing over of the Baltic Sea (many times), New York Harbor (at least once) and the River Thames (many times.) During this time the glaciers in the park expanded, and so in 1850 were more numerous and extensive than they probably were say around 1000AD or so*. Still, the rapid disappearance of the glaciers occurring now is both sad and alarming.

*Do not misinterpret this factoid as either doubt of, or evidence against, human-influenced climate change; the evidence that human activities are lending to global warming is simply overwhelming.

Back To The Point Already

Yeah so anyway, my point is that pretty much everybody knows Glacier’s geology is way, way cool. But what most people don’t know is that Glacier’s forests are way, way cool, and that together with the surrounding forests in Northern Idaho, Southern BC and Southern Alberta, are arguably the most complex, fascinating and diverse forests found anywhere in the Rockies*.

*I recognize I’m setting myself up here just a bit. If one considers the mountainous spines of Central Mexico to be southern extensions of the Rockies, my hyperbole doesn’t quite hold up.

I mentioned in the last post that as we moved North into Montana, the Larches we encountered are sort of an outlier of the Boreal Forest to the North. In some sense this is part of a broader pattern, which I touched upon back in February, when we looked at Lodgepole Pine at its Southernmost extent in the Rockies, the Uintas. Another example would be Paper Birch, Betula papyrifera, (terrible photo, left. For some reason this is the only Birch photo I bothered to take- sorry) a common tree where I grew up in New England. Paper Birch is also a common tree of the Boreal Forest, extending from Maine to the Yukon (almost the same range as Tamarack.) When we arrived in Whitefish, there it was, all over the place at its Southernmost reach in the West.

Hydrology Tangent: The highlight of our drive North from Missoula to Whitefish though wasn’t trees- it was stunning Flathead Lake (pic right). 28 miles long, it’s the biggest natural freshwater lake in the lower 48 West of the Mississippi. The setting is lovely, and the coastline is, if anything, more interesting than Lake Tahoe, with numerous bays, inlets and islands.

Nested Hydrology Tangent: Cool as Flathead Lake is, it’s only a small remnant of an even cooler, way huge prehistoric lake: Lake Missoula. Lake Missoula existed between 19,000 and 13,000 years ago and covered up to an astounding 3,000 square miles. Now you may be thinking, “Yeah, yeah, this sounds like that Lake Bonneville story you’re always going on about…” But Lake Missoula was even cooler, for 2 reasons. First, it was a pro-glacial lake, located at the edge of the melting ice sheet. So while the southern shores were dry land, the Northern shore was the massive Cordilleran ice sheet. The lake must have been spectacular, with ice bergs calving off regularly.

But even cooler still, Lake Missoula was separated from adjacent pro-glacial Lake Columbia by a 2,000 foot-high wall of ice on its Western edge- a Southward extension of the ice sheet. And roughly 40 times over the life of the lake*, the ice dam gave way, leading to spectacular repeated floods which created the Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington and actually carried icebergs as far as the Willamette Valley in Oregon.

*Though the earlier floods were much bigger and more destructive than the later, smaller floods.

Again, Back To The Point

This mix of Boreal and Rocky Mountain Forests would interesting enough on its own, but what really makes the forests of Northwest Montana fascinating is another influence- the same influence that screwed up our vacation weather- the Pacific Northwest.

Unlike the Rockies in Utah and Colorado, the Rockies up in Western Montana, Northern Idaho, and Southern British Columbia and Alberta receive their precipitation via storm tracks from the Pacific Northwest. And this differing precipitation pattern- and schedule- results in a very different forest- the Columbian Forest.

The Columbian Forest isn’t so much a single forest type as it is a mosaic of types. Northwest storm tracks and rugged mountainous terrain conspire to create forest pockets more like the West slope of the Cascades than the Wasatch. Montana trees include a whole host of Northwest characters absent from Utah and Colorado, including Western Hemlock, Western White Pine, Grand Fir, Western Red Cedar and of course Western Larch, which despite its close kinship to Tamarack, is really a species of the Pacific Northwest, not of the Boreal Forest.

These “Northwest pockets” are almost* always on the West slope of mountain ranges; East Slope forests are generally drier, and more closely resemble those of the Rockies further South.

*Guidebooks tell you that you won’t find the Pac-Northwest-type trees East of the Continental Divide. I found 1 Western Hemlock and a stand of about 1/2 dozen small Western Red Cedars along the trail to St. Mary Falls, on the North Shore of St. Mary Lake (Atlantic side.) But in general, the guidebooks are right.

Our first day in Glacier National Park, we hiked up along Avalanche Creek to Avalanche Lake. The Avalanche Creek drainage lies on the West Slope of the Livingstone Range, along the South side of Lake McDonald, where Pac-Northwest forest types are most pronounced in the park.

The 2 overwhelmingly dominant trees along the Avalanche Lake trail are Western Hemlock (pic right = trees, pic left = cones, needles) and Western Red Cedar. We’ve seen Eastern Hemlock both last summer, and again last week, in Maine, and we saw Mountain Hemlock last summer as well, during our family vacation to Lake Tahoe. But we’ve actually seen Western Hemlock as well, way back when, before anybody ever read this blog. We saw it- of all places- in Mendocino, during Awesome Wife’s & my 10th anniversary trip early last summer. That’s right- the last time we saw this tree, it was in the fog-bound, temperate forests of the Northern California coast. And yet here it was again, the exact same species, in far higher densities, in the high mountains of Montana.

Tangent: The Avalanche trail is wonderful. It leads past stunning falls (pic right) to a beautiful lake (pic below, left), is not very difficult or long, and is very kid-friendly. For these reasons it is one of the most popular trails in the park. My advice: go early. We started hiking up around 9:30AM and had the trail to ourselves most of the way up. But when we came down around 12:30 or so, there was practically a continual stream of hikers coming up.

Nested Tangent: At least 1 out of every 3 of whom asked me, “Is it much farther?” or “How much farther?” What I hate about this question is that if you don’t give then the answer they want- that it’s right around the corner- they often give you a disgusted scowl. I want to say, “Hey, I didn’t make the trail, you asked me a question and I answered it- don’t get all pissy with me for answering your damn question…” But of course I never do…

This is perhaps why in real life it would probably suck to be a ranger. When you think about being a ranger, you think of long solitary walkabouts in the backcountry, sleeping under the stars, communing with nature and maybe even adopting a bear cub or something. But I suspect that what it mostly entails is answering the same questions over and over again from scowling tourists.

Western Red Cedar, Thuja plicata (pic left = tree, below & right = leaves/scales), we haven’t looked at before, and its presence here seems even more remarkable. WRC is a tree of the coastal Northwest forests, occurring from around Eureka, CA up to the Queen Charlotte Islands. The only place it occurs East of the Cascades is here in the Columbian Forest. WRC is also fascinating in that it’s not a member of Pinaceae, the Pine Family, but instead belongs to Cupressaceae, the Cypress family, and so is related to things like Juniper* and Giant Sequoia and Incense Cedar, trees with which it shares its trait of scale-like (not needle-like) leaves.

Side Note: In fact, the presence of WRC in Montana forests reminded me of Incense Cedar around Lake Tahoe- a lone Cypress Family tree popping up in a forest of PLTs. But unlike Incense Cedar in the Sierra, which usually appears alone at widely–spaced intervals, WRC often forms sizeable stands.

*Actually Common Juniper, as well as Juniper seedlings of all species(?), has needle-like leaves. But almost any Juniper you see around Utah has scale-like leaves.

Right from the trailhead, the hike felt like a trail in Washington or Oregon, or even Maine (with the dense Hemlock stands), and I had to keep reminding myself of where we were. It wasn’t just trees; the understory was straight out of the Pac-Northwest as well. One of the most common small trees/large shrubs in the Lake McDonald Cedar-Hemlock forest is- amazingly- Pacific Yew, Taxus brevifolia (pic below, left).

Yews Are Way Cool

I haven’t mentioned Yews before, probably because they don’t occur near any of the places I’ve visited in this blog (with the exception of Mendocino.) Yews are part of a whole other family of conifers- Taxaceae- that we haven’t even touched, and which parted ways with Cupressaceae roughly 200 million years ago. Of the handful of Yew species in North America, Pacific Yew is the only one with a significant range, overlapping for the most part with WRC along the Northwest Pacific coast. Yews have flattened needles growing along the twig in 2 opposite, very even (more so than hemlock) rows (pic below, right). Pacific Yew is usually a large multi-stemmed shrub, but under the right conditions can grow as high as 50’.

There are (at least) 2 cool things about Yews. First is their “berries”, which aren’t really berries or even fruit, but a fleshy structure formed by the growth of a specialized scale (leaf) called an aril, which encloses the seed. These aril-“berries” (pic below left, not mine) are eaten by birds who then pass and disperse the seeds. If this story sounds familiar it should, because it’s basically another instance of the Juniper-berry-parallel-evolution-of-fruit-story I told back in January. Yew is yet another, parallel, independent evolution of “fruit” by a conifer.

The second cool thing is taxol, or paclitaxel, a compound (C47H51NO14) (chem diagram, right) which occurs in the bark of Pacific Yew. Taxol is a mitotic inhibitor, which means that it inhibits mitosis, the process by which a single cell divides to become 2. Inhibiting mitosis is extremely desirable when fighting cancer, and so is used in some chemotherapy treatments. Independent evolution of fruit, fighting cancer- Yews are way cool. BTW, the berries are not edible for humans.

Side Note: Taxol is now synthesized, and is no longer obtained from T. brevifolia.

The Pac-Northwest effect extends clear down to the ground. The most common knee-to-waist-high shrub in the Avalanche Creek forest is this guy, Devil’s Club, Oplopanax horridus (pic right). The broad leaves reminded me of Thimbleberry back home, but any similarity ends there. The stems are covered with spines and the berries are poisonous. O. horridus* is another plant of the Pac-Northwest that shows up here in the Columbian Forest**.

*Is that a great name or what?

**It also shows up in parts of Ontario and on Isle Royale in Lake Superior- how weird is that?

Beyond the vascular plants, the forest is practically carpeted in lush mosses (pic left). And then the lichens- tons of foliose and fruticose lichens (pic below, right) all over the place, such as we rarely see in the Wasatch.

Over the next couple of days I ran into other bits and pieces of this Cedar-Hemlock forest type on various bike rides, hikes and drives around the Flathead Valley. One easy-to-see example is the forest lining the road up to Big Mountain Ski Resort, mostly WRC and Hemlock up to the ~4,000 foot level. Another is along the lower reaches of the “Ewok Village” trail (pic left), part of the Desert Mountain mtn bike ride. It’s not really predictable, and the various patches of Pac-Northwesty forest aren’t all the same; some are full-on Cedar-Hemlock-Yew, while others are just standard Douglas Fir or Lodgepole Pine forests with an unexpected stand of WRCs suddenly popping up.

Botany-Tangent/Spotlight: That same “Ewok Village” Trail, is the only place around Glacier I saw Western White Pine. There’s a bunch lower down on the trail, just below the Cedar-Hemlock area. You’ll know it by the big (6”-9”) cones in the trail (pic right). To find the trail, buy the local mtb guide at Glacier Cyclery and check out the “Desert Mountain” ride. I did it as an out & back instead of a loop, which I recommend, but talk to someone at the shop (or me) before trying to access it out & back on your own.

The cool thing about the Columbian forest is the mosaic of forest types and relative explosion of diversity it represents. It’s a wonderful and unexpected violation of the rule that numbers of species diminish in the Intermountain West as you go farther North.

On a more personal level, the entire Cedar-Hemlock forest just feels like part of another world- someplace completely different, that does not belong there- somehow magically dropped into the middle of the Rockies. It’s almost as if you were walking across a prairie in Kansas, and all of a sudden you came upon a chunk of Costa Rican rain forest. It’s just totally counterintuitive.

In addition to the many trees and shrubs we came across that you’d never see in Utah, we encountered a whole panoply of new wildflowers. But they deserve a post of their own.

Next Up: The One Thing To Take To Glacier NP Is A Flower Guide

Montana Part 1: Missoula Weeds, Larches and Singletracks Not Taken

Note: Here’s the deal. We’re still on vacation, up in Northwestern Montana*. But I’ve already come across so much I want to blog about that if I wait till we get home later this week, I’ll be blogging about Montana till Christmas. So I’m borrowing a page out of KanyonKris’ book and starting to blog about the vacation while still on it.

Also, just a disclaimer/heads-up: I’m on a new system, with a new version of LiveWriter, and blogging from a spot with iffy access. So if there are format issues with this post or the next one, just be patient and I’ll clean things up sometime in the next week.

*New masthead photo taken yesterday morning. I need to do a post on clouds.

The Post

Driving North on I-15 out of Utah, you pass a series of low ranges in Southern Idaho before clearing Pocatello and dropping out onto the Snake River Plain.

The plain is generally flat or gently rolling, and it lasts for a couple of hours. Sometimes it’s agricultural land, but more often just open range, or scrub and lava fields. The plain breaks for good right around Spencer, just short of the Montana border, and when it does, forests start appearing again on the mountain hillsides. Although various tree guides to the West define these forests as the same type- Rocky Mountain Montane Forest- they’re different from the ones you left behind a few hours back in the Wasatch.

Side Note: The drive from Salt Lake to Glacier NP is also fascinating hydrologically. Just shortly across the Idaho border, at Malad Summit, you leave the Salt Lake drainage basin- and hence the Great Basin- and enter the Snake River Basin, which eventually drains into the Columbia and so is part of the Pacific watershed. But at the Montana border you cross over into the Atlantic watershed, specifically Red Rock Creek, which drains into the Yellowstone and then to the Missouri, then the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico. But then, just ~100 miles or so ahead, at Deer Lodge Pass (just South of Butte) you cross back into the Pacific watershed, specifically the Clark Fork, which eventually also finds its way to the Columbia. And finally, inside the park, you cross over into the Atlantic watershed one last time, specifically the Marias River, which leads- again- to the Missouri…

Our first day we drove up to Missoula and spent the night. Friday morning I did my usual family-road-trip schtick of getting up before dawn to sneak in a mtn bike ride while the family slept. I drove in the pre-dawn up to Rattlesnake Recreation Area, about 5 miles North of town, unloaded the bike and started climbing.

Tangent: I’ve previously described this family road-trip custom of riding super-early. It’s a little trickier when you’re just passing through, spending a single night. You either need to arrive in town early enough so that you can stop by a bike shop, or have really good beta- from the web or otherwise- before you arrive. Because you’ll be searching for a strange trailhead right around dawn. And you want a ride that’s fun, that’ll expose you to the local environment- whether forest, desert, or whatever- and that will give you a good workout/climb, but not be so technical that you’ll come back to your family all crabby and out-of-sorts from excessive dabbing/walking on a strange trail first thing in the morning when you’re not really awake, or worse yet, bruised from a crash. (Yes, I’ve done both.)

Given all that, Rattlesnake Rec Area was a pretty good choice. Totally non-technical, but plenty of climbing, real singletrack, nice forest, close to town and a fun, fast descent back to the trailhead.

The first big obvious difference of the forest around Missoula from the Wasatch is of course all the pines- specifically Ponderosa. Though riding through open pines isn’t terribly unusual in most of the West, it’s unheard of in the Wasatch. Ponderosas are the most common tree around Missoula, and in fact for the first hour of my ride, it was one of only 2 trees I saw, the other being Douglas Fir. That’s right- I rode for an hour and saw just 2 species of tree. And that’s the first interesting thing about the North side of the Snake River plain, is what’s not there. When you finally cross the plain and hit real mountains and forests again, you leave behind several common species of tree. Gambel Oak and Bigtooth Maple we’ve already talked about; we actually left those guys behind by the time we hit Pocatello. And in their absence, other shrubs- such as Ninebark and Rocky Mountain Maple (pic right)- seem to do well, a trend we saw several weeks ago over in the Sublett Range.

But we left behind more than that. White Fir, that ubiquitous conifer of the Wasatch, is gone. So is Blue Spruce. As a rule, species diversity in forests declines the further you go from the equator. Certainly that’s true as you go North from Arizona to Utah to Wyoming. And so it wasn’t surprising that this Montana forest had just two trees.

Tangent: Species-sparse forests- consisting of just a couple of tree-types- can either be really cool, or really boring, depending on your mood. Sometimes seeing the same darn tree or two for hours on end gets a bit old, and you start thinking about how to cut the ride short. But other times it brings on a quiet sense of order and appreciation for detail. When you can identify pretty much everything growing around you, your mind sort of settles in and you start to see little things you didn’t notice before.

Side Note: Another difference is Aspen. Though we saw plenty of Aspen later in the trip, up in and around the Flathead Valley and Glacier NP, they don’t usually seem to form the vast expanses so typical of Wasatch forests. Interestingly, when I did research for my Aspen posts last summer, one of the most intriguing things I read was that the Aspens of Montana reproduce primarily sexually, unlike ours in the Wasatch, which almost always reproduce clonally. And this difference begs the question of whether the Aspen of Montana are actually evolving faster than those in the Wasatch. Over the last 10,000 years, Aspen in the Wasatch- and most of Utah and Colorado- have effectively experienced one single, clonally-extended generation, while those in Montana have probably experienced something like 200-250 generations.

Montana’s Meanest Weed Is Way Pretty

The paucity of species extended to wildflowers. With the exception of a few Asters, I saw none of the familiar wildflowers back home, and overwhelmingly just one species of flower in bloom. But that may have less to do with latitude and diversity than it does with the flower in question: Spotted Knapweed, Centaurea maculosa (pic left).

C. maculosa is an exotic, native to Eastern Europe. It’s a member of Asteraceae, and so related to things like Dandelions and Mules Ears and Balsamroots, but belongs to a different tribe, Cynarea. In fact, the thing you’ve no doubt seen here in North America that’s much more closely-related to it is Carduus nutans, the dreaded, evil Musk Thistle.

Spotted Knapweed is a tough, tenacious invader, particularly in the Northwestern US; in Montana alone it’s invaded more than 4.5 million acres. It regularly outcompetes and displaces native ground cover due to 4 attributes: 1) It’s got an extra-efficient tap-root, giving it first dibs on groundwater. 2) Like its evil cousin, it’s a super-high seed-producer (an advantage shared to greater or lesser degree by most composites.) 3) It’s not much favored as a food source, and 4) There’s some evidence that it may be allelopathic, inhibiting the growth of adjacent plants.

Interestingly, factors 3 and 4 may be connected, as both appear to be the result of the Knapweed’s production of phytotoxic chemical, specifically a catechin.

Side Note: Catechins are a class of secondary plant metabolites. Primary plant metabolites are organic compounds associated with plant growth, development or reproduction. Secondary plant metabolites aren’t directly involved in any of that stuff, but rather perform other functions, like- for example- poisons.

The catechin produced by C. maculosa is present in both the leaves and roots. In the leaves its presence makes the foliage unpalatable to grazers. From the roots it infiltrates the soil, where it appears to cause cell death in the root tips of other plants. Exactly how it kills the cells is not completely clear, but one hypothesis is that it somehow causes a spike in calcium ions, which act as messengers in plant signaling pathways associated with stress response.

Back in Europe, Spotted Knapweed occurs in and among other ground cover and isn’t dominant. But here in North America, our plants don’t know how to deal with, and it ends up being the only wildflower around in large areas (pic above, left). Lots and lots of countermeasures- both chemical and biological- have been, and are currently, used to attempt to control it. I read that in Glacier NP, in the high meadows near Rising Sun, rangers remove it by hand when found*.

*Whether or not that’s actually the case, I saw plenty of the weed in the park below 5,000 feet, especially on the East/Atlantic side.

All About Larch

OK, back to trees. After an hour of climbing I paused at a trail junction to pee*. As I did so I looked up and around, and noticed a couple of trees that looked different. And sure enough they were. They were Western Larches, Larix occidentalis.

*Yes, that’s right- yet another botanical discovery/observation while peeing!

Larches are that epitome of weirdness in the world of conifers- a deciduous PLT. In fact many of us use the words “conifer” and “evergreen” almost interchangeably. But just as there are evergreen angiosperms, there are deciduous conifers, most of them Larches, and Larches are the only deciduous conifers in North America. We’ve looked at Larches before, last summer in Maine, when I saw them around the Mud Pond, and again, fleetingly, from the train window last October*, en route from Prague to Vienna.

*Which is, regrettably, the only time I’ve seen Larches changing color. Those would have been European Larch, L. decidua, which has supposedly also been introduced and subsequently escaped/naturalized in the Northeastern US.

The Larches in Maine are Tamaracks, L. laricina, far and away the most widespread and common North American Larch, extending from Maine, clear across the Canadian Boreal Forest and into the Alaskan interior. But there are 2 other North American Larch species.

These Larches occur only in the Northwest- the Cascades and Northern (but not really Northern) Rockies. They’re almost like outliers of the Tamarack domain, and when I looked at the range maps, I assumed that Western Larch was an isolated population of Tamaracks that became a new species.

But when I checked out the research* on North American Larches, I was surprised to find out that the opposite seems to be the case. Western Larch shows a much more diverse gene pool than Tamarack, which appears to have gone through some recent genetic bottleneck (presumably due to recent, repeated glaciations of its range.) If anything, Tamarack is likely to be the (wildly successful) offshoot of Western Larch!

*If you follow the link and actually read the paper, the story of Eurasian Larches is way fascinating. If you’re a plant-geek, anyway.

Side Note: I discussed genetic bottlenecks this Spring when talking about the Blue Piñon down in Mexico.

In the West, Larches don’t occur any further South than central Idaho. In a sense, they’re almost a “Boreal extension” into the Rockies, a hint of the cold, endless forest beyond.

Side Note: The other species is Subalpine Larch, L. lyalli, which occurs in Glacier NP, but which I didn’t see/ID this trip.

Larch needles are lighter-colored than most other conifers, giving them a comparatively light green, almost cheerful, aspect. They’re attached to the tree in little, flaring bundles of 10-20 needles, which makes them easy to ID up close (pic left). The needles are also short, and together with their unusually twig-attachment architecture, this gives them a relatively “scraggly” silhouette when compared with adjacent Pines or PLTs. Larches are shade- intolerant, love direct sun, and given the right conditions, can quickly outgrow surrounding pines, firs and Douglas Firs. Unlike Tamaracks, which almost never reach 100’, Western Larches can grow over 200’ in height (pic right, Bird Whisperer for scale.)

The Singletrack Not Taken

After another 20 minutes of climbing (and a cool but ultimately dead-end side-trail* exploration) I reached an overlook to the North, framed by this stunning stand of Larch (pic left). Beyond, the trail continued, dipping down a bit. It looked mysterious, twisty, smooth and inviting, the ultimate promise of fine, new singletrack ahead(pic right). But I was out of time. The family would be waking, and we had places to go, things to do. I always hate this moment. Looking ahead at new, untraveled trail, in a place where it might well be years- or never- before I return with time and opportunity to explore further, to see what’s around the next bend. This is what I both love and hate about the West: a thousand unexplored trails, and no matter how many you manage to explore, there’ll always be a thousand more. You can spend your life exploring this part of the world, and yet never really know it.

*Aren’t those the weirdest? You’re in a strange place, riding along, you find an obvious, well-traveled side trail and decide to follow it. Over the next mile or so it gets fainter and fainter, and eventually disappears altogether. What happened? Where did it go? Why are all these other bikers following it? Are they all just clueless out-of-towners like me?

I made it back in time to catch the hotel continental breakfast with Awesome Wife and the Trifecta. As we munched on scrambled eggs, cocoa puffs and do-it-yourself waffles*, I mused about how though we’d “lost” a few tree species on our trip North, we’d gained at least 1 new one. I didn’t yet appreciate how weird things would get as we continued North.

*Don’t those hotel/motel continental breakfasts have the oddest food combinations? I always think about European tourists coming down from their rooms in the morning, checking out these weird breakfast buffets, and thinking, “OK that’s it. These Americans are totally whacked. It is utterly beyond me how a people that eats so poorly managed to put a man on the moon.”

Next Up: The Fantabulous Columbian Forest

Maine Vacation Part 2: Lakes, Ponds, Eskers, Glaciers and the CIA

As longtime readers know, I’m a non-native Utahn who absolutely loves living in Utah. I love the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the P-J woodlands- I even love the Great Salt Lake*.

*And I’m one of the few Utahns who does. Utahns generally ignore or malign the lake, and that’s a shame because it is- in its own weird, hyper-saline way- way, way awesome. Someday I’ll do a great post on the lake, and then you’ll get how awesome it really is.

In fact, there’s really just one thing I really miss about New England. It’s not the ocean, it’s not the Red Sox, it’s not even Maple Syrup. It’s lakes. Freshwater lakes.

Tangent: Yes, I’m one of those funny people who prefers lakes to the ocean. The ocean is beautiful and all, but it has a weird and frightening power about it at the same time. Standing on an ocean beach is sort of like standing on the edge of the world. There’s constant force and noise, and the certain knowledge that if you just swam out straight ahead, you’d tire and drown long before you caught sight of land again.

Yes, I know that’s true for many lakes as well, but in general lakes and ponds have a quiet peace and serenity and well- finite-ness- about them that the sea just doesn’t have. They’re quiet and full of interesting little mysteries, almost like outdoor libraries, and conducive to study and reflection.

Then there’s the swimming, the act of diving into clean freshwater, that’s somehow- when you slip in all hot and sweaty, fresh from a run, bike, or bike ride- like diving into cool velvet, refreshing in a way an ocean dive just never can be.

Nested Tangent: A reservoir isn’t like this; you don’t get the same sensation from diving into Lake Powell for instance. When you’re raised in and on freshwater, a man-made lake always has a certain smell and feel that is forever reminiscent of a refrigerator in need of a good cleaning. It’s like the difference between real Coke and Diet Coke; if all you’ve ever drunk is Diet Coke, then it tastes just fine. But if you grew up drinking real Coke, the Diet version seems forever a cheap, stagnant copy.

As I mentioned in Monday’s post, I spent many summers alongside a small lake in Western Maine, but have visited, swum in, hiked to and canoed upon dozens more. Northern New England is positively strewn with lakes, and until I was about 20 years old or so, I naively thought pretty much everyplace was so blessed.

Me, Lakes and the CIA

My senior year in college, a defense contractor flew me out for an all-day interview in central Pennsylvania. I had lunch with a young Engineer, about 2 years older than me. We talked about hobbies, the area, and what I liked to do when not working. Since my favorite recreation at that time- swimming, canoeing, sailing- centered around lakes, I asked about them. My lunch-companion furrowed his brow and thought long and hard, but couldn’t think of a single lake in the area.

Tangent: No, I didn’t get the job. In fact, though I interviewed with several defense contractors my senior year (my degree is in Electrical Engineering), none offered me a job. In retrospect I consider this one of the great “lucky dodges” of my life. Years later as a salesman I called on, and sold to, a number of large defense contractors, and concluded after a time that by and large, the people who work for large defense contractors Have No Souls.

No, no, no- I’m not talking about ethics or war or anything; I’m not a pacifist. I think there really are bad people and forces in the world and that war- as awful as it is- is sometimes justified. No, what I’m referring to is the spirit of longtime defense contractor employees. After a decade or 2 it seems that they have no excitement, no joy, like they’ve somehow lost their ability to see the Beauty of the World. Maybe it’s the bureaucracy, maybe it’s the secrecy, I don’t know. They’re just missing something.

Nested Tangent: So what job offer did I get- and accept- my senior year? I accepted an offer from- and I swear to god I am not making this up- the CIA. That’s right, I accepted a job with the CIA. Unfortunately or fortunately, I ran into, er, ahem, ‘issues’ around the security clearance process, and never actually began employment with the agency. I eventually took a job with a non-defense-related tech company.

There’s a great story around this, that involves polygraphs, investigators, an interview with a shrink, interrogators and peeing into absurdly tiny containers, but alas, I’ve “tangented” long and far enough. I’ll save my CIA story for a future tangent in a future post.

When I returned to campus, I got a hold of some maps and did some research. Though New England and upstate New York are littered with lakes, South of New York state they disappear. Continuing West, they appear again only in the far North, as in upper Wisconsin and Minnesota. Eastern Canada of course is practically carpeted with lakes, large and small, and the reason for all these lakes in the North is glaciation.

Over the past million years or so, ice sheets have rolled back and forth across Northern North America repeatedly. Each time they push and carry pebbles, stones and boulders, which they leave behind when they melt/recede. The rocky soil impedes drainage in ways that the soils of the Midwest or South do not, and this leads to the fascinating hydrology of the North.

How Maine Hydrology Is Like A Giant Frank Lloyd Wright House

The interior of Maine contains thousands of lakes and ponds. The first obvious-but-cool thing about lakes is that there is no “lake level.” Lakes and ponds occur at all different altitudes and together form series of terraced pools, linked together in large, complex drainage basins. Our lake (or “pond” as we’ll see in a moment) is one of 4 connected ponds that sits (usually) at 572 feet above sea level. A fifth pond, which drains into ours via a ½ mile-long brook (pic right), sits 8 feet higher. The combined 5 ponds drain through a river and series of falls to a much larger pond- only 8 miles South as the crow flies- which lies at only 369 feet. That larger pond drains into the Saco River and rambles on for another 140 circuitous miles before reaching the Atlantic just South of Portland, being joined on the way by dozens (maybe 100+) more “little” drainage basins en route. And that’s just one drainage basin. Hydrologically, Maine is a like a giant Frank-Lloyd-Wright-Castle, with elegant and complex terraced pools cascading into one another all across the state.

Tangent: Just over the “hill” from our pond lies Cushman Pond, up at 740 feet. Cushman, a mere 1.25 miles Northwest as the crow flies, is the closest body of water to ours that is infected by the dreaded exotic aquatic weed Cinque Milfoil. But fortunately it’s closer to 100 miles away as the water flows. Hydrology involves distances, scale and connections that are often very different from those in the surrounding “dry world.”

Our “lake” – the “Back Pond” of 5-Kezar Lakes- or 5-Kezar Ponds, depending on which map you look at- is usually called a pond. Strangely, there’s no agreed-upon difference between lakes and ponds; ponds are usually bigger, but many “ponds” are bigger than many “lakes.” Technically, according to the state of Maine, our pond, at 62 acres*, is a great pond, as it’s over 10 acres in surface area. Adjoining Middle Pond is the largest of the 5 at 72 acres. The other 4 all drain into it and Middle Pond in turn drains into the falls.

*Which, coincidentally, is the exact same surface area as Walden Pond.

Back, Middle and Front Ponds are divided by narrow, sandy, forested eskers. That dividing Middle and Front Ponds is the longest and best-defined, but our cabin sits on the other esker, between Back and Middle Ponds. Eskers are narrow, thin, sandy strips of land all over the state that divide bodies of water, and generally run North-South, and their origins are absolutely fascinating.

Awesome Tangent/Spotlight About Water Lilies

Botanical Spotlight*- Water Lilies: For this post, I decided to focus on hydrology and geological origins of lakes/ponds. But it was a tough choice, because lakes and ponds are so wildly fascinating biologically. Fish, Loons, Snapping Turtles, Water Snakes- any of these would’ve made for a great post. Even the botany of lakes and ponds is amazing. No, not just the botany of the plants by the lake- the botany of the plants in it. Here’s a quick example:

*I’m using the “Botanical Spotlight” instead of a “Tangent” here due to a complaint from a Tangent-Only-Reader (let’s call him “Sid”)- whom I will henceforth refer to as TORies- that I got technical in a couple of tangents in Monday’s post.

Water Lilies (family= Nymphaeaceae) are common in calm freshwater ponds. Rooted on the pond bottom, with flowers and leaves floating on the surface, they’re angiosperms and have pretty flowers. Often small frogs or dragonflies or damselflies hang out on their pads. Everybody knows all that. But here’s something you probably didn’t know: Water Lilies* are possibly the most basal group of angiosperms, meaning that they branched off on their own path long before, and are more distantly related from, just about every other angiosperm. Their origins long pre-date the monocot/dicot split; even Magnolias are more closely-related to Oaks, Sagebrush and grasses than are Water Lilies.

*Which, by the way is why Water Lilies are named wrong. A “Lily” is a monocot, something that was still millions of years in the future when Water Lilies branched off from the rest of angiosperms.

Side Note: Technically, the absolutely most basal/distantly-related angiosperm is now thought to be the family Amborellaceae, which consists of a single species, the shrub Amborella trichopoda, which is native to- where else?- yes, that’s right, my absolute favorite Gondwanaland fragment- New Caledonia*. Another group that appears to be about as basal/distantly-related to all other angiosperms as Nymphaeaceae is Austrobaileyales, an order of about 100 species which includes the spice Star Anise.

*I have got to get there someday. That place has so got it (botanically) going on.

Water Lilies have big showy flowers that are “primitive” in that they have lots of stamens, lots of not-clearly-differentiated petals/sepals, and fair number of sort-of-petals-sort of stamens. In this respect they’re reminiscent of Magnolias (also notable for their “primitive” flowers) and also bring to mind cultivated Roses, many of whose stamens have been coaxed by breeders back into a more primitive, petal-like form.

There are about 70 species of Water Lily, around the world. The common species of Water Lily around the lakes is Fragrant Water Lily, Nymphaea odorata, which is one of the most widespread Water Lilies in the world, ranging from Central America to Norhtern Canada. Like most Water Lilies, N. odorata flowers open during the warm part of the day- late morning to mid-afternoon- then close up for the night (pic right). True to their name, they smell absolutely lovely, though you have to get up good and close to sniff them.

This Part Is So Freaky-Cool It Blows My Mind

The eskers dividing our ponds are the deposited sediments of ancient streambeds that ran under the mile-high ice-sheets under the state. Our cabin sits on an ancient streambed that only 14 or 15,000 years ago lay under a mile of ice! These sub-glacial streams typically ran out toward the South-facing edge/front of the ice-sheet, which is why most eskers run North-South.

Tangent/Spotlight/Whatever/Get-Over-It-Sid: OK, one more botany thing. The sandy soil of eskers makes them a frequent home for Red Pine, Pinus resinosa, which otherwise doesn’t seem to be all that common in the Maine woods.

As the glaciers receded from Southern Maine about 13,000 years ago, they generally retreated fairly evenly by the coast and adjacent lowlands. But in the hilly interior, large, multi-acre glacial chunks became isolated and later buried by sediments. These chunks endured for several centuries, and when they finally melted, left deep depressions that became the sites of many of today’s lakes and ponds (often called kettle ponds.)

Shortly after the glaciers receded, 5-Kezar Ponds probably was a single, bigger, deeper pond. But the ice melted, it fed strong flows that carried sediments and gravel, making its waters highly erosive, and they carved a deep gorge through the granite blocking the South end of what is now Middle Pond, providing a lowered drainage outlet that lowered the elevation of the ponds to below that of the eskers.

Today Kezar Falls Gorge (pic left) is 6 feet wide and 30 feet deep. On Friday we canoed down to the South end of Middle Pond, then hiked down and around a few hundred yards to the bottom of the Falls, where together we jumped in and swam up the gorge. In a “normal” year, you can swim all the way up and stand atop the pile of boulders at the bottom of the falls, but the flow is so high and strong this year that I could barely make it to within 6 feet of the bottom before the current forced me back.

Happy but a bit worn out from our efforts, we returned to the canoe and started the long paddle home. The South end of Middle Pond is my favorite part of the ponds. It’s un-developed and wild-looking, and it’s easy to think it’s been like this forever. But only 800 or so generations ago, none of this- forest, ponds, falls- was here. The world changes fast.

Next Up: Uh, nothing for a bit. Believe it or not, we’re leaving on our next vacation tomorrow morning*. After 10 years, Awesome Wife is going back to work, a part-time Reading Specialist position with Salt Lake School District. She’s thrilled, but we had to compress our vacation schedule a bit to be home in time for her start-date.

Our vacation will take us up into Western Montana, and I probably won’t be blogging much over the next week. But I expect I’ll have plenty to blog about when we return, including some surprising botanical and geological parallels between our 2 vacations. Have a great week.

*Yes, of course Ray will be at the house while we’re gone. Don’t even think about it.