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Big Picture Forests
Article #363 October 2024
By Bill Cook

Every now and then, I get a bug up my butt to drive long distances.  Part of the motivation is to see forest types that I don’t normally get to see in the Lake States.  Forest management varies from region to region, as our great North American forests change.   

    In the Lake States, balsam poplar (balm-of-Gilead, bam, balm, Populus balsamifera) is not the most respected species but a good example.  Most of this species’ range lies north of us.  In the heart of its range, it’s a rather respectable tree, of good size and brilliant yellow fall color, rivaling our truly unmatched sugar maple.  Here in our southern neck of the woods, leaf diseases usually turn the leaves brown before they get a chance to glow yellow. 
    Our Lake States temperate forests just tickle the underside of the vast boreal biomes, sometimes described as spruce-moose-goose country.  Well-named, yet there is so much more, naturally.
    Marching north, the boreal forest becomes variable mixes of spruce, tamarack, paper birch, quaking aspen, and balsam poplar.  Lots of spruce.  And more spruce.  Jack pine is common into the high latitudes, too, east of the great prairies.  On the west side, we find its cousin lodgepole pine, on similar habitats.  Near the ocean, sitka spruce appears sometimes quite large.  Woody shrubs are dominated by willows, alder, bog birch, and various species of blueberry.  These forests stretch into the tundra, although they tend to be considerably stressed and stunted.  Eventually, they pretty much disappear altogether. 
    It was rewarding to touch the Arctic Ocean at Tuktoyaktuk, and chat with a local guy about how folks there made a living.  Life had little to do with forests, as there were no forests. 
          The tundra also has brilliant fall colors, despite the lack of much tree cover.  The bearberry, blueberries, bog birch, willows, and alders splash the permafrost, rolling hills, and mountain sides with color combinations that may have thrilled painters like Van Gogh. 
    Canada and Alaska have had some marvelous wildfires.  I say “marvelous” depending upon how you’re affected by them.  For the ecologist in me, I see vast regeneration and much increased richness of browse resources.  It appears that life accelerates for many years following a wildfire. 
    However, the human impacts hold life-threatening challenges.
    The store owner in small Telegraph Creek, northern British Columbia, lost her home, shop, garage, and grandmother’s home in the 2018 Alkali fire.  Many of the town’s buildings were burned but many were spared, as if the fire would pick and choose according to some secret algorithm.  The Alkali fire was one of Canada’s largest fires.  There’s only one gravel road into Telegraph Creek.  The entire town of about 200 evacuated to Dease Lake, about 60 miles at the other end of the road. 
    Along the Stikine River, I asked a fisherman what happens if the fire blocks the road.  “Then, you’re stuck”, he said as he smiled.  He then told me a story of his grandparents who lived in a village where we were standing.  In the 1950s, another fire ripped through, before the road or any modern fire-fighting capability.  The village burned to ashes.  The people took refuge in the river for two days while cinders rained upon them.  The large rock at the confluence of the two rivers became known locally as “town rock”, because it helped save the people.  Across the river from “town rock” is a cliff face with volcanic lava columns resembling a wingspread bird.  The people call it “eagle rock”.  It is considered a sacred protector.  “We live in a place that just burns every once in a while, you just gotta accept it”, my fisherman philosophized. 
    Fire can also be a forest management tool, as the most recent Youtube episode of “BeLEAF It or Not!” helps illustrate.
    Dipping down below the 49th parallel in the west, the forests again change.  Well-known species dominate, such as ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir, lodgepole, and host of firs, spruces, and cedars.  Who grows where depends upon altitude and which side of the mountain (called aspect by foresters).  In the late 1800s, C. Hart Merriam described a series of life zones largely based on these two factors, which affected temperature.  Much of his observation holds true today, although more sophisticated vegetation description systems have been developed. 
    Most land in the western states is not forested, and never was, or at least not over the last several thousand years.  At lower elevations, there is insufficient moisture to support forests, so we see shrub woodlands, grasslands, and deserts.  This is not terribly different from the tundra or alpine treeline, in some ways.  This lack of continuous western forest sometimes surprises us easterners.  In fact, about three-quarters of the U.S. forest is located east of the Mississippi.  Really.  Look it up.  
    Of course, travelling through the vastness of North America, one discovers that the relationship between people and forests changes.  Attitudes, values, uses, and connections vary with cultures and circumstances.  We in the Lake States have our own peculiar association with forests, as chocked-full of diversity as just about anywhere else.  Of course, this time of the year, we’re all thinking color!
    I ponder these things as I drive my thousands of miles and chat with people along the way.  I learn a lot by listening, and watching. 

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