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Of Ancient Trees and Young Lava · Street Smart Naturalist

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Greetings,
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: this is David B.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Williams and the podcast of my newsletter,
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: The Street Smart Naturalist, Explorations of the Urban Kind.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Every week I share my observations and adventures with the human
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: and natural world around Seattle, Puget Sound, and the Pacific Northwest.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Today's episode explores a wonderful grove of my beloved Douglas fir.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: To learn more about my work,
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: including my next book,
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: In the Range of Fire and Ice,
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: A Human and Natural History of Washington's Cascades,
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: please go to my website, geologywriter.com.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: You will also find a link to my Substack newsletter and my previous five and
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: a half years of newsletters, as well as images tied to this week's episode.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks again for joining me on this adventure,
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: and welcome to Podcast 90 of the Street Smart Naturalist of Ancient Trees
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: and Young Lava.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: If you have been reading my newsletter for some time,
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: you know that I have a deep and abiding love for Douglas firs.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: They have appeared as subjects many times,
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: ranging from celebrating them in our backyard,
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: to describing their naming history,
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: to their use in dendrochronology for dating lahars on Mount Rainier.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well-known and well-regarded,
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Douglas firs are the quintessential tree of the Pacific Northwest.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: They grow from sea level to the alpine zone and are some of the tallest,
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: ginormousest, that seems like that should be a word, trees on the planet.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Recently, though,
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: I saw Douglas firs in an almost alien environment,
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: one so on Pacific Northwest that the trees seem that they shouldn't be there.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yet they were.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And they are some of the older Douglas firs growing anywhere.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: The location even merits a less than likely paced name,
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: El Malpais National Monument, the Badlands.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Located a few miles south of Interstate 40 in New Mexico,
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: El Malpais showcases numerous lava flows younger than 60,000 years old.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: The youngest is just 3,900 years old, the one we visited erupted about 1,100 years ago.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Geologists refer to the flows as pahoehoe and a'a-type rock.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Both terms originated in Hawaii,
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: the first in reference to ropey lava,
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: often with brownie-like texture,
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: and the second to the sound one makes when walking across the ragged,
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: jagged surface of a'a.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Fortunately,
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: we were wearing rugged shoes,
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: but I could still feel the sharp, craggy basalt through my soles.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: I first heard that ancient Douglas firs grew at El Malpais about 30 years ago.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: I, of course, had to go see them.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Fortunately,
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: my wife worked for a summer camp located nearby,
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: so I had a good excuse to seek out the trees.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Serendipity was on our side.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: We ran into two park rangers who gave us directions to the trees.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Cross three cradle guards,
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: take the first left,
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: drive one half mile,
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: walk about 25 minutes till the road and lava converge,
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: look for a salt lick,
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: head east from it until the horse head skeleton, then go north up the lava.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: This time,
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: we had more specific directions,
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: or actually a specific location, latitude and longitude.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: We drove as close as we could,
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: parked by the side of the road under a ponderosa pine and headed onto the basalt,
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: about 200 yards from the car.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: The surface was classic p'hoi-hoi and a'a,
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: undulating over a mix of the brownie texture and jagged cobbles,
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: boulders, and flows.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Never was the root level for more than a few feet.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: We had to pay constant attention so as not to fall on the unforgiving rocks.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Atop the 40 to 50 foot high flow were numerous trees,
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Ponderosa Pine, Rocky Mountain Juniper, and Douglas Fir.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: None were terribly tall.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: The 20-year-old Douglas Fir in our front yard is as big as any trees we encounter.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Dotting the surface were many downed trees,
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: some with spiral trunks that looked as if an ancient giant had grabbed the tree
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: in both hands and tried to squeeze out all the moisture.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually, we made it to the GPS coordinates I'd been given by a researcher.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: The Douglas firs were tall and straight, but still not very big.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Many had cones, and we also saw several young, or at least small, trees.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: In this environment, a tree with a 2-inch diameter could be 100 years old.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: At one downed tree, we could get a hint of the density of life.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Every tree ring was at most a millimeter wide,
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: as if the tree only parsed out enough nutrients to eke out an existence.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: But what an existence?
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: In a 1997 report of the New Mexico Bureau of Mines and Mineral Resources,
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: dendrochronologists described numerous furs with ages in excess of 600 years,
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: as well as several over 700 and 1,274 years old.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: They hypothesized that this wasn't the lone tree born 10 centuries ago.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: In addition, they dated the log of a Rocky Mountain juniper at 1,888 years old.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: It had germinated in 29 BCE and died in 1859.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: We are confident that the Malpais contains 2,000-year-old living juniper trees
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: and perhaps even older ones, wrote the report's authors.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: Although the lavathos look alien and inhospitable
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: to my PNW temperate rain-soaked eyes,
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: clearly they are firvana for the firs, pines, and junipers.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Or, as the researchers say, the environment is protective.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Not stressful.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: The jagged terrain reduces access to loggers, individual harvesters, and animals.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: The minimal ground cover inhibits the spread of fire,
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: and the textured surface creates areas where moisture can accumulate.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: I have no idea if we saw the 1303 year-old Douglas Fir,
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: but it was still glorious to be around the ancient trees of El Malpais.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Using the tree rings to better understand climate variation,
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: The dendrochronologists were able to reconstruct rainfall patterns covering more
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: than 2100 years.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: The trees revealed favorable climate conditions between 1024 and 1398,
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: as well as two periods of drought.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: These dates correspond well with fundamental changes exhibited by ruins nearby.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: For example,
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: in the middle 11th century,
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: the Great Complex at Chaco Canyon,
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: less than 100 miles north,
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: peaked with an extensive road network that stretched for hundreds of miles.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Then the first of the two droughts shown in the tree rings hit, causing Chaco to depopulate.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: I like to think that some of those early inhabitants or visitors
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: to Chaco passed near some of the trees we saw on our visit.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps they were as intrigued as we were by trees growing on the lava flows.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they even counted the rings on trees that lay on the ground and wondered about
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: the great age of those who came before.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Whether they did or didn't,
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: I find it hard to imagine that anyone who sees these Douglas Furs is not amazed
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: by their tenacity and thirst for life.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Long live Douglas Furs.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Once again,
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: this is David B.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Williams,
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: author and voice of The Street Smart Naturalist,
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Explorations of the Urban Kind,
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: a weekly newsletter and podcast focusing on the human
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: and natural world around Seattle, Puget Sound, and the Pacific Northwest.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: If you'd like more details about my walks and talks,
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: including In the Range of Fire,
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: along with a link to sign up for my newsletter and podcast,
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: check out my website, geologywriter.com.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: And don't forget to slow down, pay attention, and enjoy the world around you.