Forest Boulders
by Dan Miller
Title
Forest Boulders
Artist
Dan Miller
Medium
Photograph - Photography
Description
Ponderosa pine is handsome and it gets big. To be in a stand (a foresters’ term) of big ponderosa with their orange plates of thick bark shining in the sun is akin to being in a grand cathedral - better. Ponderosa pines have long dark needles wrapped in bundles of twos and threes. Those dark green needles get even darker in winter. They are the source of the name for the Black Hills of South Dakota. It’s a good thing ponderosa is so striking to see because its name sure doesn’t give any hint of what it’s about.
These beauties like to show off so they like to be in the lower mountain elevations where people can see them. That hasn’t been a great strategy for the biggest trees because it made them the first ones cut by early loggers in the West. The stories of driving a team of horses pulling a wagon for miles though valleys forested with big ponderosa are pretty much all we have left of those times, see the book, "Following Old Trails" by Arthur L. Stone, Missoulian Editor, 1913. Those beautiful ponderosa pine stands were the result of management policies by Native Americans over long periods of time. They set fire to the forests - often. That meant the flame lengths were only four, eight, or maybe twelve feet because of the frequent burns there wasn’t much fuel on the ground to carry a hot fire. These “cool” fires would not kill the bigger trees because their thick bark insulates the phloem and cambium, but the "cool" fires would stimulate the growth of grass and shrubs the following year, providing excellent feed for deer, elk, and buffalo the people relied on for food. This forest management policy served the people well for over four hundreds of generations.
These fires would certainly kill any small trees in the way of the flames, but fire in the forest doesn’t burn uniformly. There will be many spots within a fire’s general perimeter that are not burned or burned very lightly. It may be that there was not enough ground fuel to carry the fire, or the humidity came up, or the wind changed, or night came, whatever the reasons, some areas within a fire are left unburned. Small trees survive in these spots. In the next fire cycle, these small trees may have grown their bark thick enough to survive a cool fire and they are on their way to becoming a 250 year old big beautiful orange barked ponderosa - that smells like vanilla, or butterscotch if you smell the bark up close. These trees are somewhat shade tolerant, but not total shade. That characteristic causes the trees to be spaced out so everyone gets some sun and trees of various size and age are growing near one another. These factors make for what is called a “park-like” forest. We can visualize that. So when the early settlers came, there were beautiful park-like ponderosa pine forests, provided by the First People’s management and time - hundreds of years.
The fire management strategy that created the mature ponderosa pine forest in the valleys was really designed to stimulate the grasses and shrubs for the grazing and browsing animals the people needed to survive. If a change in weather caused a fire that had been burning for several weeks to become a threat to their village, the people could simply take the cover off the lodgepoles and move their homes out of the way.
When settlers came to the valleys it was a different story, they built permanent homes, barns, fences, etc.. These structures needed boards, the big pines were cut to make those boards. Fires could not be tolerated because if a fire burned freely it could burn homesteads - and that was before insurance was invented. A new policy would evolve for managing ponderosa pine forests, the policy we are living with today. It doesn’t include allowing trees to become 250 years old, we can make use of their wood long before they reach that mature age. Today there aren’t many of these magnificent old growth ponderosa pine forests, the few exist in specially protected areas such as Wilderness, special study areas on public lands and a few places here and there where a continuum of people who simply appreciate beauty have said, "no we won’t cut these pines, at least not now."
Uploaded
April 23rd, 2019
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