My
hike with my daughter and her boyfriend, at about 11,600 feet elevation north
of Santa Fe, showed me that I can still push my body to limits that most people
my age cannot attain. It felt brutal at the time but almost immediately afterwards
the memories were shimmering and beautiful. Here are some of the things we saw.
The
trail started off in the douglasfir (Pseudotsuga
menziesii) zone and quickly reached the subalpine zone. I didn’t quite make
it into the tundra on top of Santa Fe Baldy.
Decades
ago, there were large fires, and aspens (Populus
tremuloides) quickly filled the spaces. But since there have been, to all
appearances, no fires for a long time, the aspens have grown quite large. Each
clump of aspen, covering perhaps much of an entire mountainside, is a genetic
individual: one tree with hundreds of trunks. These aspens, whether due to age
or genetic differences, had tan-colored bark rather than the white bark I have
seen so often in the Black Hills. The bark is thin, translucent, and has a
layer of green photosynthetic cells under it.
There
were many species of subalpine wildflowers. Columbines (Aquilegia) were rare in the shade, and camass lilies (Zigadenus) were more common out in the
meadows.
There
were lots of mushrooms and mushroom pickers. The pickers were all smart enough
to avoid the deadly Amanita:
A
huge storm chased us back to the car for the last few hundred feet of our trip.
I
have seen montane and subalpine forests in California, Arizona, Nevada, Washington,
Montana, South Dakota, Colorado, and Utah; they all have many features in
common but each is unique. We cannot save wild places by just fencing off a
token forest or two.
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