The Rocky Mountain Wonderland Part 9

Outside the National Parks and a few game preserves he is without refuge from the hunter throughout the year. It is not surprising that over the greater portion of his old territory he rarely is seen. He is, indeed, rapidly verging on extermination. The lion and the tiger are often rapacious, cruel, sneaking, bloodthirsty, and cowardly, and it may be better for other wild folk if they are exterminated; but the grizzly deserves a better fate. He is an animal of high type; and for strength, mentality, alertness, prowess, superiority, and sheer force of character he is the king of the wilderness. It is unfortunate that the Fates have conspired to end the reign of this royal monarch. How dull will be the forest primeval without the grizzly bear! Much of the spell of the wilderness will be gone.

Bringing Back the Forest

Bringing back the Forest

During the last fifty years repeated fires have swept through Western forests and destroyed vast quant.i.ties of timber. As a result of these fires, most species of trees in the West have lost large areas of their territory. There is one species of tree, however, that has, by the very means of these fires, enormously extended its holdings and gained much of the area lost by the others. This species is the lodge-pole pine.

My introduction to this intrepid tree took place in the mountains of Colorado. One day, while watching a forest fire, I paused in the midst of the new desolation to watch the behavior of the flames. Only a few hours before, the fire had stripped and killed the half-blackened trees around me. All the twigs were burned off the tree beneath which I stood, but the larger limbs remained; and to each of these a score or more of blackened cones stuck closely. Knowing but little of trees and being interested in the fire, I paid no attention to these cones until a number of thin, brownish bits, like insects' wings, came fluttering and eddying easily down from the treetop.

The ashes and the earth around me were still warm, and the air was misty with smoke. Near by, a tall snag and some fallen logs smoked and blazed by turns. Again, a number of these tissue bits came fluttering and whirling lightly down out of the fire-killed treetop. Watching carefully, I saw brown tissue bits, one after another, silently climb out of a blackened cone and make a merry one-winged flight for the earth. An examination of these brown bits showed that they were the fertile seeds of the lodge-pole pine. With heroic and inspiring pioneer spirit, this indomitable tree was sowing seeds, beginning the work of reconstruction while its fire-ruined empire still smoked.

It is the first tree to be up and doing after destructive flames sweep by. h.o.a.rded seeds by the million are often set free by fire, and most of these reach the earth within a few hours or a few days after the fiery whirlwind has pa.s.sed by. Being winged and exceedingly light, thousands are sometimes blown for miles. It would thus appear that the millions of lodge-pole seeds released by fire begin under most favorable conditions. Falling as they do, upon earth cleaned for their reception, there is little or no compet.i.tion and but few enemies. The fire has banished most of the injurious animals, consumed compet.i.tors and their seeds, and prepared an ashen, mineralized seed-bed; not a leaf shades it, and altogether it is an ideal place for the lodge-pole seed and seedlings.

It seems extraordinary that fire, the archenemy of the lodge-pole pine, should so largely contribute to the forest extension of this tree. It is not only one of the most inflammable of trees but it is easily killed by fire. Despite these weaknesses, such are the remarkable characteristics of this species that an increase in the number of forest fires in the West will enable this tree to extend its holdings; on the other hand, a complete cessation of fires would, in time, almost eliminate it from the forest!

The lodge-pole pine (_Pinus contorta_, var. _Murrayana_) lives an adventurous frontier life, and of the six hundred kinds of North American trees no other has so many pioneer characteristics. This species strikingly exhibits some of the necessary requisites in trees that extend or maintain the forest-frontier. The characteristics which so largely contribute to its success and enable it to succeed through the agency of fire are its seed-h.o.a.rding habit and the ability of its seedling to thrive best in recently fire-cleaned earth, in the full glare of the sun. Most coniferous seedlings cannot stand full sunlight, but must have either completely or partly shaded places for the first few years of their lives.

Trees grow from seed, sprouts, or cuttings. Hence, in order to grow or to bring back a forest, it is necessary to get seeds, sprouts, or cuttings upon the ground. The pitch pine of New Jersey and the redwood of California, whether felled by fire or by axe, will sprout from root or stump. So, too, will the aspen, chestnut, cherry, cottonwood, elm, most of the oaks, and many other kinds of trees. The extensive areas in New Brunswick and Maine that were cleared by the fires of 1825 were in large part at once regrown with aspen, most of which sprouted from the roots of burned aspens. Willow is easily propagated from a short section of the root, trunk, or limb. These sections may be broken from the tree by accident, be carried miles down-stream, lodge on sh.o.r.e or shoal, and there take root and grow. Beaver dams made of willow poles are commonly overgrown in a short time with willow. Several years ago a tornado wrecked hundreds of willows along a Kansas stream. Each willow was broken into scores of pieces, which were carried and dropped along the track of the tornado. Countless numbers of them were stuck into the earth. Several thousand willow trees were thus successfully planted by this violent wind.

Seeds are the chief means by which the forest is extended or produced.

They are sown by wind and gravity, by water, by birds and beasts. I have dwelt at length upon the romance of seed-scattering in "The Spell of the Rockies," in the chapter concerning "The Fate of a Tree Seed."

Each species of tree has its own way of scattering its seeds. Once upon the earth, they and the seedlings that may spring from them have peculiar limitations and special advantages. In some cases--as, for instance, with most willows and poplars--these seeds must in an extremely short time find a place and germinate or they perish; the seeds of few trees will stand exposure for two years and still be fertile.

It is only a question of a few years until seeds are carried to every treeless locality. They may journey down-stream or across lakes on a log, fly with birds across mountain-ranges, ride by easy stages clinging to the fur of animals, or be blown in storms across deserts; but these adventurous seeds may find gra.s.s in possession of the locality and so thickly sodded that for a century or longer they may try in vain to establish a forest.

Commonly wind-blown seeds are first upon the ground and the most numerous. Though it is of advantage to be the first upon the ground, it is of immense importance that the seed which falls in an opening produce a seedling which thrives in the sun-glare,--which grows without shade. The seedlings of our great oaks and most strong and long-lived trees cannot thrive unless shielded from the sun, sheltered from the wind, and protected from the sudden temperature-changes which so often afflict openings. While these maintain the forest areas, they extend it but little. Only a small number of trees have the peculiar frontier characteristics. Young trees which cannot live in the sun are called tolerant,--they tolerate shade and need it. Species which conquer sunny territory are called intolerant,--they cannot stand shade and need sunlight. It will thus be seen that the acquirement of treeless territory by any species of tree demands not only that the tree get its seeds upon the earth in that territory, but also that the seeds, once there, have the ability to survive in the sunlight and endure the sudden changes of the shelterless opening. Most species of oaks, elms, firs, and spruces require shade during their first few years, and though they steadfastly defend possessions, they can do but little toward winning new territory. On the other hand, aspens, willows, gray birch, cottonwood, old-field pine, and lodge-pole pine produce seedlings that glory in the sunlight and seek to gain more territory,--to push forward the forest-frontier.

Again and again the forest has been swept away by fire; but again and again a few aggressive species have retaken speedily the lost territory. In this pioneer reclamation the aspen and the lodge-pole are leaders. The aspen follows the water-courses, running along the muddy places, while the lodge-pole occupies the dry and rocky slope of the burned area. Seen from a distance the aspen groves suggest bright ribbons and pockets on the sombre cloak with which lodge-pole drapes the mountain. And even beneath the trees the contrast between the methods of these two agents of reforestation is marked. The lodge-pole pine is all for business. Its forest floor is swept clean and remains uncarpeted. The aspen groves, on the other hand, seem like the haunts of little women. Here the floor has a carpet of gra.s.s gay with columbines, sweet peas, and wild roses. While the aspens and the lodge-poles are still young they begin to shelter the less hardy coniferous seedlings. But sooner or later both the aspens and the lodge-poles themselves are smothered by their nurslings. They then surrender their areas to forest trees that will live to be many times their age.

But that species which is preeminently successful in bringing back the forest to a burned-over area is the lodge-pole pine. It produces seeds each year and commonly h.o.a.rds them for many years. Its seeds are light, winged, and easily carried by the wind. As they are frequently released by fire, they are sown at the most opportune time, scattered in profusion, and, in windy weather, transported long distances.

Commonly lodge-pole pine holds on to, or h.o.a.rds, a percentage of the seeds it bears; that is to say, these seeds remain in the cone, and the cone remains on the tree. In some situations it begins to bear at eight years of age, and in most localities by the time it is twelve.

Year after year the cones, with their fertile seeds safely enclosed, are borne and cling to the tree. Some of these cones remain unopened from three to nine years. A small percentage of them do not open and distribute their seeds until they have been on the tree from twelve to twenty years, and many of the cones cling to the tree through life.

Under favorable conditions the lodge-pole is a rapidly growing conifer. In a forty-five-year growth near my home, the varied light and soil conditions were so spotted that in a small area marked differences in growth were shown. A few cl.u.s.ters were vigorous, and the trees showed an average diameter of six inches and a height of thirty-four feet. From this the size dropped, and in one group the individuals were less than one inch in diameter and scarcely tall enough to be used as a cane; yet all were forty-five years old.

The lodge-pole is not long-lived. The oldest one I ever measured grew upon the slope of Long's Peak. It was three hundred and forty-six years of age, measured twenty-nine inches in diameter, and stood eighty-four feet high. A study of its annual rings showed that at the age of two hundred it was only eleven inches in diameter, with a height of sixty-nine feet. Evidently it had lived two centuries in an overcrowded district. The soil and moisture conditions were good, and apparently in its two hundred and second year a forest fire brought it advantages by sweeping away its crowding, r.e.t.a.r.ding compet.i.tors. Its annual ring two hundred and two bore a big fire-scar, and after this age it grew with a marked increase of rapidity over the rate of previous years. A mature lodge-pole of average size and age measures about eighteen inches in diameter and stands sixty feet high, with an age of between one hundred and twenty-five and one hundred and seventy-five years.

The clinging habit of the cones of the lodge-pole pine in rare cases causes numbers of them to be caught by the expanding tissues, held, and finally overgrown and completely buried up in the tree like a knot. Commonly the first crop of cones is the one caught. These are usually stuck a few inches apart in two vertical opposite rows along the slender trunk. Each k.n.o.b-like cone is held closely against the trunk by a short, strong stem.

I have a ten-foot plank from the heart of a large tree which shows twenty-eight imbedded cones. The biography of this tree, which its scroll of annual rings pictured in the abstract, is of interest. The imbedded cones grew upon the sapling before it was thirty years old and when it was less than twenty-five feet high. They appeared upon the slender trunk before it was an inch in diameter. Twenty-six annual wood-rings formed around them and covered them from sight as completely as the seeds the cone-scales clasped and concealed. The year of this completed covering, as the annual rings showed, was 1790.

Then the tree was sixty-six years of age; it came into existence in 1724, and apparently, from the forest-history of the place, in the pathway of a fire. This lodge-pole lived on through one hundred and eighty-two years. In the spring of 1906 a woodsman cut it down. A few weeks later two-inch planks were sliced from the log of this tree in a sawmill. The fourth cut split the pith of the tree, and the startled sawyer beheld a number of imbedded cones stuck along and around the pith, the heart of this aged pine. These cones and the numerous seeds which they contained were approximately one hundred and fifty years old. I planted two dozen of the seeds, and three of these were fertile and sprouted.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OVERGROWN CONES IN THE HEART OF A LODGE-POLE PINE (Showing also the cones as borne on the twigs and an early stage of the overgrowing process)]

Old trees may carry hundreds or even thousands of seed-filled cones.

Once I counted 14,137 of these on the arms of one veteran lodge-pole.

If we allow but twenty seeds to the cone, this tree alone held a good seed-reserve. Commonly a forest fire does not consume the tree it kills. With a lodge-pole it usually burns off the twigs and the foliage, leaving many of the cones unconsumed. The cones are excellent fire-resisters, and their seeds usually escape injury, even though the cones be charred. The heat, however, melts the resinous sealing-wax that holds the cone-scales closed. I have known the heat of a forest fire to be so intense as to break the seals on cones that were more than one hundred feet beyond the side line of the fire.

In most cases the seedlings spring up on a burned-over area the year following the fire. Often they stand as thickly as grain in the field.

Under favorable conditions as many as one hundred and fifty thousand will appear upon an acre, and a stand of fifty thousand to the acre is not uncommon. Starting in a close, even growth, they usually suppress for years all other species of trees and most other plants. Their growth is mostly upward--about the only direction possible for expansion--with moderate rapidity. In a few years they are tall but exceedingly slender, and they become poles in from twenty-five to fifty years. The trappers named this tree lodge-pole because of its common use by the Indians for lodge, or tepee, poles.

In overcrowded stands, especially those in which groups or individual trees have slight advantages over their neighbors, a heavy percentage of the growth may die annually for the want of nutrition. If equal opportunities prevail in a crowded tract, all will grow slowly until some have an advantage; these will then grow more rapidly, and shade and suppress neighboring compet.i.tors.

The lodge-pole does good work in developing places that are inhospitable to other and longer-lived trees, but it gives way after preparing for the coming and the triumph of other species. By the time lodge-poles are sixty years of age their self-thinning has made openings in their crowded ranks. In these openings the shade-enduring seedlings of other species make a start. Years go by, and these seedlings become great trees that overtop the circle of lodge-poles around them. From this time forward the lodge-pole is suppressed, and ultimately its fire-acquired territory is completely surrendered to other species. It holds fire-gained areas from seventy-five to one hundred and fifty years. It is often supplanted by Douglas or Engelmann spruce. Let fire sweep these, and back comes the lodge-pole pine.

Though it distances all compet.i.tors in taking possession of fire-cleared territory, it is less successful than its fellows in entering a territory already occupied by other trees or by gra.s.s, because its seedlings cannot endure shade, and its seeds will not germinate or take root except they be brought directly into contact with clean mineral soil. The lodge-pole, therefore, needs the a.s.sistance of fire both to acquire and to hold territory. Increase the number of forest fires, and the lodge-pole extends its holdings; if we could stop fires altogether, the lodge-pole would become almost extinct.

The lodge-pole has an astonishing alt.i.tudinal as well as lat.i.tudinal range. Scattered pretty well over the mountain region of the western United States, thence northward along the coast over much of the head-waters of the Yukon in Alaska, it occupies an enormous area. Over this it adapts itself with marked success to a variety of soil, moisture, and climatic conditions, and covers ragged tracts from warm sea-beaches to dry, cold mountain slopes eleven thousand feet above the sea. In many places it surrenders the traditional pole form of its race and wins success by becoming thick-barked, stocky, and limb-covered from top to bottom.

Mountain Parks

Mountain Parks

The gra.s.sy park openings within the mountain forests are among the great charms of the outdoor world. These are as varied in their forms as clouds, delightfully irregular of outline. Their ragged-edged border of forest, with its gra.s.sy bays and peninsulas of trees, is a delight. Numbers are bordered by a lake or a crag, and many are crossed by brooks and decorated with scattered trees and tree-clumps.

Others extend across swelling moraines. All are formed on Nature's free and flowing lines, have the charms of the irregular, and are model parks which many landscape gardeners have tried in vain to imitate. They vary in size from a mere gra.s.s-plot to a wide prairie within the forest.

"Park" is the name given to most of these openings, be they large or small. There are many of these scattered through the Rocky Mountains.

North, South, and Middle Parks of Colorado are among the largest.

These larger ones are simply meadows on a magnificent scale. Each is an extensive prairie of irregular outline surrounded by high forest-draped mountains with snowy peaks,--an inter-mountain plain broken by gra.s.sy hills and forested ridges. Here a mountain peninsula thrusts out into the lowland, and there a gra.s.sy bay extends a few miles back into the forested mountains. Samuel Bowles, in the "Springfield Republican," gave the following description of Middle Park while it was still primeval: "Above us the mountain peaks go up sharp with snow and rock, and shut in our view; but below and beyond through wide and thick forests lies Middle Park, a varied picture of plain and hill, with snowy peaks beyond and around.... It offers as much of varied and sublime beauty in mountain scenery as any so comparatively easy a trip within our experience possibly can.... A short ride brought us into miles of clear prairie, with gra.s.s one to two feet high, and hearty streams struggling to be first into the Pacific Ocean. This was the Middle Park, and we had a long twenty-five miles ride northerly through it that day. It was not monotonous by any means. Frequent ranges of hills break the prairie; the latter changes from rich bottom lands with heavy gra.s.s, to light, cold gravelly uplands, thin with bunch gra.s.s and sage brush; sluggish streams and quick streams alternate; belts of hardy pines and tender-looking aspens (cottonwood) lie along the crests or sides of the hills; farther away are higher hills fully wooded, and still beyond the range that bounds the Park and circles it with eternal snows."

[Ill.u.s.tration: A MOUNTAIN PARK IN THE SAN JUAN MOUNTAINS]

During one of his early exploring expeditions, John C. Fremont visited North Park and wrote of it as follows: "The valley narrowed as we ascended and presently degenerated into a gorge, through which the river pa.s.sed as through a gate--a beautiful circular valley of thirty miles in diameter, walled in all around with snowy mountains, rich with water and with gra.s.s, fringed with pine on the mountain sides below the snow line and a paradise to all grazing animals. We continued our way among the waters of the park over the foothills of the bordering mountains."

Hayden Valley in the Yellowstone National Park is another large gra.s.sy opening in a mountain forest. This valley apparently was once a vast arm of Yellowstone Lake.

Estes Park, in Colorado, is one of the most attractive as well as the best known of the mountain parks. Although much smaller than Middle or South Park, it is much larger than hundreds of the other beautiful mountain parks. The Estes Park region embraces about one hundred square miles, though only one third of this is open. The approximate alt.i.tude of the ragged lowland park is a trifle less than eight thousand feet. This is entirely surrounded by high mountains which uphold a number of rocky, snowy peaks. In 1875 Dr. F. V. Hayden, father of the Yellowstone Park, wrote of this region: "Within the district treated we will scarcely be able to find a region so favorably distinguished as that presented by Estes Park. Not only has nature amply supplied this valley with features of rare beauty and surroundings of admirable grandeur, but it has thus distributed them that the eye of an artist may rest with perfect satisfaction on the complete picture presented." Erosion and glacial action have given this region its form, while fire made the beautiful opening or park within a forest.

The majority of parks or meadow gardens which decorate the forests of the Rocky Mountains probably owe their existence to fire. Trees and gra.s.s are endlessly contending for the possession of the earth. In this incessant silent struggle a sweeping fire is generally of advantage to the gra.s.s. Trees suffer more from fire than does gra.s.s.

It is probable that repeated fires enable the gra.s.s to hold the plains and prairies against the encroachments of the trees. Each forest fire commonly gives the gra.s.s possession of a part of the area formerly dominated by the forest. Usually both gra.s.s and trees are prompt to seize any fire-cleared area. The gra.s.s may be first to come, or some s.p.a.ce may be wet or in some other way unfavorable to tree seed but encouraging to gra.s.s seed.

While forest fires bring many of these parks, others are glacier meadows, lake-basins which time has filled with sediment and sodded with gra.s.s. Many are due to the presence of water, either outspreading surface water or an excess of underground water just beneath the surface,--to streams visible or invisible. A few result from boggy places which result from impaired drainage caused by landslips or fallen trees. Thousands were made by beaver dams,--are old beaver ponds that filled with sediment and then gra.s.sed over.

Most parks that owe their origin to forest fires have charcoal beneath the surface. A little digging commonly reveals charred logs or roots.