Two days of driving from Dinosaur to Boulder, through desert bleakness and Rocky Mountain drama. I’m obviously not a biologist, but I’d guess we rolled through about a dozen ecosystems. At times, we could see three or four of them simultaneously. In eastern Utah, we were in a sort of sage and tumbleweed desert (predominant colors gray and grayish green). But in the distant hills where it is a bit cooler and maybe a bit more moist, you could see minature juniper forests (darker green trees on darker soil). Creeks and rivers are visible for miles because of lanky, leafy cottonwoods that crowd the riverbanks. These trees are in the midst of changing colors now, so we had pale greenish-yellows, oranges, reds, tans and browns. For the final few hours of the desert, the snowy tops of the Rockies were visible in the distance.
The most remarkable thing, sadly, was how devastated most of the conifer forests are with the pine beetle infestation. Some forests seemed about 80 percent dead. Some areas look like all the mature trees are dead or dying, leaving just smaller trees, maybe 10 years old or younger. Other areas are less wiped out. But just about everywhere, the forests are much less green than they used to be, and showing a lot of the dead gray color of bare conifers. (See Lynn’s notes, below.)
We stopped for the night in a Forest Service campground on Lake Granby, near the ghost of Camp Chief Ouray. It’s gone now, but my older sister and I went to YMCA sleepaway camp there decades ago. The landscape of gently rolling mountains and thick forests was still very familiar.
In the morning, we woke up to a misty fog that concealed the peaks. We had hoped to spend the day in the spectacular alpine scenery of Trail Ridge Road, the winding highway through Rocky Mountain National Park. It was closed for “severe weather,” whatever that is. So we turned back and went over the Front Range at Berthoud Pass, which was plenty spectacular. Mist veiled most of the peaks around us. We drove through a very light snow for about an hour. Then the clouds partially lifted, and we were treated to a show of peaks playing hide-and-seek. The snow-dusted mountain tops around there are rounded and muscular-looking rather than pointed. They appeared and disappeared as the clouds moved and we followed the twists of the mountain highway. And then suddenly, brilliant blue sky opened up. It’s what I remember from my childhood here. It will storm for a few hours, and then -- bang! -- the sun comes out.
Coming out of the mountains at Golden, near Boulder, we stopped for coffee. When we came out, the car wouldn’t start. The battery was completely dead. So we waited for the AAA guy, and then took a short drive to the nearest Toyota dealer, in Boulder, and got a new battery. As Lynn pointed out, it could have been a lot worse. In the morning, when it was really cold, snow was on the way, we were about 50 miles from the nearest gas station with only sketchy cell phone service, the car had started right up. The battery only went dead when we were with cell phone service, near the AAA guy, the sun was out and we were well coffeed up. It screwed up the day’s schedule, but really, the Guppy is taking care of us.
We returned the favor by getting her a oil change and lube, got the brakes checked, tried replacing some burned out bulbs… just doing a bit of maintenance that was due.
Now we’re visiting with my mother, Rebekka, in Boulder, at the retirement community, Frasier Meadows, where she’s lived since April. She seems healthy, happy, and seems to like her new home a lot. It’s great to see her, and it’s great to be out of the cold again. She’s remained involved in her many political and social activities concerning health care, politics, women’s issues and bicycling issues. She also knits for several good causes: booties for babies at the community hospital, squares for afghans, caps for soldiers in Afghanistan to wear under their helmets. On the weekends, she goes to the Shabbat service here at Frasier Meadows, as well as the Unitarian service that she always went to, and then finishes out the round of religious observance with a Bible study group led by a Lutheran minister.Last night we had dinner with my old friend Linda, from high school, and her husband, Kevin. Linda teaches old-style, darkroom photography to high-school students, all of whom, she said,
have computers and digital cameras and other easier ways to make images. They still want to learn how to use a darkroom. Go figure. She thinks it’s because they want to make things with their hands, and because it’s magic watching the images appear in the trays under the red light.Kevin had been running his own business for years, machining parts for pinhole cameras. He was knocked out of business a few years ago by cheaper parts being shipped from China. He had been looking for a job and had just landed one. So we were in on the celebration for that!
We went by her parents’ house first, and wow!! They are both artists, both in their 80s, and are turning out amazing work. Linda’s father, Al Slobodin, went through a period of three-dimensional work that is somewhere between painting and sculpture, creating figures with found objects, pieces of computers and electronic gear and formed concrete shapes and ceramic art that he made himself. Most of the titles involve some sort of wordplay as well. Very beautiful work. Now he’s doing complicated, precise geometric paintings. Linda’s mother, Jean, does large, lovely, soft-focus landscapes and seascapes with big areas of textured color that make you feel like you’re outside, surrounded by the scenery. And we forgot our camera. What a shame!
Notes from Lynn:
Dendroctonus ponderosae. The ugly name fits the tiny black destroyer of the vast forests of the West. Until we began the journey that would whisk us past conifers beyond counting, the pine beetle was only two words often modifying “infestation.” As city dwellers and admirers of the Sierra Club, we hear a lot about the battles to save old growth forests. We don’t like to see mountains scalped by clear-cutting and the resulting monoculture plantings. Every year on the way to Camp Mather we comment on the regrowth of the immense swaths of Sierra woodlands cut down by fire several years ago near the South Fork of the Tuolumne River. The pine beetle? Never gave it a thought. Until now.
The shock came slowly. In the great forests of Oregon and Washington, we couldn’t help but notice bloomings of red and gray trees amid the oceans of green treetops. In western Montana’s Lolo Pass and the approach to Chief Joseph Pass, we saw whole mountain slopes populated by the skeletons of what had been living lodgepole pines. But in the Rocky Mountains of eastern Colorado, Bard and Vasquez peaks tower at 13,000 feet above forests being annihilated by the voracious larvae of Ma and Pa Pine Beetle. They set up housekeeping by boring into the bark of a ponderosa pine, or a Scotch pine, or a lodgepole. The female lays about 75 eggs in what the beetle people call “galleries.”
When enough pupae turn into larvae in galleries throughout the bark, the tree is probably doomed. Or so we learn from the Internet, but you don’t need a Ph.D in beetlology to look at the growing cemeteries of millions and more millions of dead trees. This year’s crop of pine murder won’t be evident for eight to ten months, when the branches turn into the red and yellow hues we associate with New England in October.
Billions of pines (and an occasional Douglas fir) are already corpses in forests from Mexico to Canada. In the Rocky Mountain counties of eastern Washington, we are told, more than one and a half million acres have been infected. Some can be salvaged for pellets or pulp, but using the dead wood for firewood can spread the infestation to healthy trees. Although householders can usually keep the beetles at bay with a late spring spraying of water mixed with carbaryl (whatever that is), the only way to save a forest of pines is – you won’t like this – is cut it down and/or burn it. The forests will regenerate, according to the helpless tree experts, in about 50 years.
We glimpsed the future at the Arapaho National Forest campground on Lake Granby. No trees. A few seedlings. Lots of new stumps.
Mileage: From Dinosaur National Monument to Lake Granby: 243
From Lake Granby to Boulder: 107
Total mileage so far: 3,285
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