Project>Mono
Tree stories …
When I returned to Mono Basin in October for the first time in nearly 20 years, one of the first things I did was to visit a giant Jeffrey pine standing along the banks of Lee Vining Creek, near where the glacier-fed stream flows into Mono Lake.
I doubt the tree remembered me, but I certainly remembered it, reaching for the sky, straight, tall and powerful, its bark scented with a mysterious mix of vanilla and butterscotch. It looked pretty much the same as it did 20 years ago, although I’m sure it has grown several feet taller and a few inches wider.
I have no idea exactly how old this tree is, but it’s been growing at this spot for at least a few hundred years, a seemingly indifferent sentinel to the stream and the lake, as well the environmental change during that span. There have been droughts, both natural and human-caused, as well as wildfires, heatwaves and floods. And the tree persists.
When I lived a few miles from that spot back in the mid-1980s, Mono Lake was the subject of a fierce environmental battle. Lee Vining Creek, along with several other streams flowing into the lake, had for decades been blocked and diverted into the Los Angeles Aqueduct. I remember wondering how the tree survived so long in the dessicated streambed as the water table dropped.
I was hopeful that it would continue to grow, because right around that time, I learned that people have the ability to repair the damage we’ve done to nature, as long as we can find the will to do so. Along with allies, the grassroots Mono Lake Committee was fighting tooth and nail to protect the Mono Lake ecosystem from more diversions, and the tide was about to turn.
Since then, water has once again been flowing continuously down Lee Vining Creek, and when I revisited the tree, I imagined how it may have been relieved, its roots no longer straining quite so much to find a drink of water, breathing easier, inhaling carbon dioxide, locking it away for centuries and exhaling precious oxygen.
If you’re wondering why I’m writing about trees in a blog about Mono Lake and water, it’s pretty simple. There would be no trees without water, and water would cycle through our global ecosystem very differently, if at all, if there were no trees. And around the Mono Basin, Jeffrey Pines tell some interesting stories about our climate, both past and future.
For me, Jeffrey Pines are the defining trees of the Mono Basin. To be sure, there are plenty of other species. Aspens and cottonwood growing in strands along the river corridors or lining ponds and wetlands, as well as piñons and junipers scattered over the drier uplands.
But none grow as tall and majestic as the Jeffrey pines, which have spread remarkably far into the dry interior of the Great Basin here, thanks to a gap in the crest of the Sierra Nevada Mountains that allows enough Pacific moisture to stream inland to nurture big stands that grow in seemingly inhospitable pumice soils and even directly up the rocky crags of the many volcanoes the dot the landscape.
Indigenous Peoples who lived for thousands of years before European colonizers arrived collected pandora moth larvae from the trees, cooked and dried them, and stored them as a source of protein and fat for the long cold winters. Later, sheepherders in the region called them lightning trees. Since they are often the tallest thing around, they attract strikes, and probably benefited from low intensity fires that cleared out competing vegetation.
They are well adapted to fire, which could be important in the age of global warming, as other forests succumb to flames. According to the U.S. Forest Service, firefighters report that the trees seem to extinguish themselves. When flames lick at the tree trunks, the trees shed the thick, singed plates of bark to repel the heat, thus preventing fatal damage.
There are other clues that the Jeffrey pines are survivors. During one of the recent California droughts, scientists noticed the tips of some old, drowned trees sticking out of Tenaya Lake, high in Yosemite National Park. When the researchers studied the trees, their age matched up with other climate records to show that grew in a much drier and warmer time between about 1,000 and 500 years ago.
Human-caused global warming is once again tipping the climate in that direction. Can Jeffrey Pines survive and serve as a forest climate refuge for wildlife in the anthropocene? Only time will tell.
