A Tree and a Rock

This month I have no news about the serviceberry I’m following. I’m far from home, in a warmer drier land. So instead, here’s a report of a tree I came across on a narrow precipitous ridge crest, holding a boulder in its roots! This was curious enough in itself, but just as interesting were the thoughts it brought to mind. I realized this tree was keeping the boulder from continuing a trip that had started maybe sixty million years ago. Trapped by the tree, it couldn’t make the next leg—a steep 2000-foot descent to the Green River. But the delay would be minor, basically imperceptible. Even five hundred years of imprisonment would be but a fleeting obstacle in this boulder’s journey.

Next leg of the trip—down to the Green River, 2000 feet below the ridge crest.

This is not a local rock—not sandstone, siltstone nor shale. It’s hard tough quartzite, which is why it survived the long punishing journey that started 60 million years ago in the high country of a newly-created mountain range to the north. A fragment of bedrock—perhaps broken by folding, faulting, or frost—was carried many miles by streams, bumped and bashed, worn smooth and round, and left here.

The rock itself is far older than the mountain range. It began as sand in a deep rift valley, 700 million years ago.

For maybe 30 million years, weathering and erosion chipped away at the mountains, reducing them to sand, dirt and pieces of rock. That’s typical—as soon as mountains rise, demolition begins. “Mountains seem massive, abiding and immutable … yet if we look carefully at rocks, if we use them to peer into the past and conjure up the world they came from, we find that mountains too are ephemeral.”

The piles of sand, rock and dirt along the trail used to be part of a mountain range.

The amount of debris carried down and deposited was so immense that the mountain range was largely buried in its own rubble. Probably only the highest peaks stood above extensive gently-sloping surfaces. Then the land rose again—not as mountains, but the entire region. Erosion went back to work, this time exhuming the old buried landscape. It removed much of the debris deposited just a few million years before, but not all. Relic patches remain today on high surfaces—like the narrow precipitous ridge I walked. But unless things change, this too will be gone.

In the meantime, the quartzite boulder will have to wait a bit, because hundreds of years ago a pine seedling managed to get established and now has grown large. Its roots grew down into the pile of debris, circumvented the quartzite boulder, and trapped it. Though trail construction exposed the boulder, it can’t roll down to the Green River just yet. It has to wait until the tree dies and the roots decay. But given the scale of its life, I doubt that it feels the least bit impatient.

Now let’s consider the tree. It’s a pinyon—Pinus edulis (“pine edible”)—one of millions growing in the vast pinyon-juniper woodlands of the American West. Because pinyons live in country that is cold in winter and dry for much of the growing season, they grow slowly, never getting very big. But they are trees of great bounty, producing abundant large seeds beloved of squirrels and jays and little boys.

The sticky green young cones contain maturing seeds, on which wildlife will depend for winter survival (as did people in the old days).

With the right beak or teeth, older cones can be torn from the tree and pulled apart to get at nutritious seeds.

Left alone, cones open on the tree and seeds fall of their own accord.

Big tasty pinyon nuts are worth hunting for—even if you’re only five years old!

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This month I’m following hésho tsítonnê

It’s the seventh of the month already! … time for monthly reports from tree-followers around the world.  But I’m 1200 miles from home and my willow.  I won't know what it’s doing until I return in a few weeks.  So I’m reporting on a surrogate, the pinyon pine – also known as hésho tsítonnê or gum tree.

I knew I would be in pinyon country, so I looked into pinyon pines before I left.  This earlier post is an overview.  So far I’ve been hanging out with the two-needle pinyon.  Together with Utah juniper (Juniperus osteosperma) it forms pinyon - juniper woodlands covering millions of acres.

Two-needle or Colorado pinyon, Pinus edulis.  Source.

Distribution of two-needle pinyon and its western relative, the singleleaf.  After Lanner 1981.

On harsh sites, pinyon pines can be especially photogenic ... tough gnarled little trees with disproportionate trunks and crowns.  These portraits were taken in sandstone country near spectacular Muley Point Overlook in southeast Utah.  Some of the pinyons were pretty spectacular too, in their own way.

Pinyon pine poses with Indian paintbrush in the foreground and Navajo Mountain behind.

This tree is only 4.5 feet tall, but the trunk is over a foot across at the base.

How about that switch-backing trunk! (click on image to view)  There's a close-up below.

Pinyon pines are quite pitchy, so much so that Zuni Indians called them hésho tsítonnê or gum trees.  The pinyons at my campsite were indeed gummy, and pitch blobs were scattered on the ground beneath mature trees.

Pitch is a plant resin.  It’s not the same as sap, which transports nutrients through the tree. In some cases, pitch is clearly protective and “may confound a wide range of herbivores, insects, and pathogens.”  Trees use it as a dressing on open wounds.

Pitch protecting an area where bark was removed.

Like the trees, Navajo and Hopi people used pinyon pitch to dress open wounds, sometimes mixing it with red clay.  Its most important use was in sealing water jugs.  There were many other applications – glue, dye, medicine and even a teflon-equivalent on sandstone griddles for cooking Pueblo wafer bread:

"It took them almost a day to get the stone properly heated, rub the squash oil into it and then rub it again with wads of piñon gum, which melted and sank into the pores.  They finished by scrubbing the stone with juniper and pine twigs, which left it clean and slightly scented.”  – Ruth Underhill, Workaday life of the Pueblos (in Lanner 1981)

In summer, the Navajo turned pinyon pine trees into shade shelters.  They cut off the lower branches and carefully sealed the stubs with mud.  For if they didn’t, pitch would rain down on inhabitants and their belongings.  What a horrendous sticky mess that would be!

Pitch is messy but it’s also magical, making pinyon wood the perfect fuel for an evening out.  It produces a hot sparkling aromatic campfire that frees the mind and lets it wander far from real world cares:

“Nobody who has sat before a roaring, pitch-boiling, bubbling, scented fire of piñon can think of it as the mere consumption of wood.  It is the spirited release of centuries of brilliant sunlight, absorbed under a cloudless Southwestern sky …”  – Ronald Lanner (1981)

Campfire of pinyon and juniper.  Even a few small dead branches will make a lively fire.

Sources (in addition to links in post)

Lanner, RM.  1981.  The piñon pine, a natural and cultural history.  University of Nevada Press, Reno.

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Dreaming of Pinyon Pines

Tree is about six feet tall; crown is twelve feet across and loaded with cones.

The small pine I dreamt about last night must have been a pinyon.  The site looked right: dry, rocky, sparsely-forested – really more of a woodland – and little ground cover.  Yes, it must have been a pinyon pine.

Do I repeat myself?  No, pinyon pine is not a tautology – not one of those pointless combinations of English and Spanish like Table Mesa (tr: Table Table) or Cuesta Grade (tr: Grade Grade).  A pinyon (piñón in Spanish) is the seed (often called a nut) of the pinyon pine (pino piñonero in Spanish).  We call the trees pinyons for short.

Small trees, small cones, BIG seeds!  Source.

The seeds of pinyon pines are large and nutritious – so much so that jays, humans and other animals put a lot of time and energy into collecting them.  Pinyon jays are especially dependent on pinyons.  In late summer, they go to work picking sticky sappy green cones and hammering them apart to extract fat seeds.  These they carry to traditional nesting areas, where they stash them on the ground among dead needles and twigs.  The jays continue collecting into fall; their work gets easier as the cones dry and open up.

By the time the harvest is over, many thousands of pinyons have been cached.  When spring comes, they're eaten by nesting female jays and the young fledglings.  But some seeds are always overlooked, and some germinate and grow.  Thus the jays return the favor … by planting pinyon pines.

Pinyon jay.  In the old days, Westerners called it the blue crow.  Source.

There was a time when people also survived on pinyons.  In the old days, tribes harvested and stored seeds each fall.  Tasty, nutritious, calorie-rich pine nuts made excellent winter food, especially where agriculture wasn’t possible.  But in some years, pinyon yields were poor; for tribes without agriculture, such years were very tough.

Pinyon pines are rare here in Wyoming.  This is the north edge of their range; they grow only in the extreme southwest part of the state.  When I visited Flaming Gorge Reservoir last fall, I found a few close to the state line (with Utah).  They were mostly saplings and young trees.  Does this mean the pinyon is extending its range?

Pinyon youngster.

Small but vigorous sapling.

Pinyon sapling in shady habitat.  The two-needle pinyon, Pinus edulis, is the one that grows in Wyoming.

Soon I will be where pinyon pines are common – where they partner with junipers to form pinyon-juniper woodlands that occupy more than 75,000 square miles in the western US.  On the Colorado Plateau, the pinyon is the two-needle, Pinus edulis, the source of "American" pine nuts.  As the name suggests, they have two needles per fascicle (bundle) ... usually.  Some individuals also have three-needled fascicles.

Two-needle pinyon pine, also called Colorado pinyon pine.

When I leave the Colorado Plateau and enter the Great Basin to the west, the pinyons will change.  Single-leaf pinyon, Pinus monophylla, will replace the two-needle.  As  you might guess, it has a single needle per fascicle.

Single-leaf pinyon.  Needles are single but still “bundled” – note fascicle along base of each.  Source.

I expect to see the single-leaf pinyon off-and-on for much of the trip, as it also grows in the Mojave Desert, Tehachapi Mountains and as far west as the southern Coast Ranges of California.  This was the first pinyon pine I met ... long ago.  I made its acquaintance in the Coast Ranges when I was a field botany student.  I look forward to renewing our friendship.

Where the pinyon pines grow.  After Lanner 1981.

I'm eager to find, photograph and learn more about pinyon pines.  Already they impress me, in part because they defy our concept of great trees.  We generally admire trees for being tall, strong and ancient.  We have organizations devoted to finding and registering the largest individual of the various kinds of trees – the champions.  But is anyone looking for a champion pinyon pine?  Probably not.

Two-needle pinyon with its woodland partner, the Utah juniper.  All three of us are 5 ft 6 in tall.

In harsh arid habitat, the pinyon pine’s small stature makes it a survivor.  It's tough, tenacious, and photogenic.  But it wasn’t always this way.  Pinyons used to be as tall as other trees.  This is what happened:

In the old days the Washo people lived by a river created by Wolf-god.  Every fall they gathered to collect pine nuts – and hunt, feast and sing.  But then there was a terrible drought and the river dried up.  Fires destroyed the pines, so there was no food.  Many people died; the rest were severely weakened. Wolf-god came back to help.  He scattered pine nuts, and trees soon grew.  But the people were too weak to climb.  Wolf-god tore off the tops of the trees, and put them directly in the ground.  The Washo could harvest nuts from the low crowns, so they survived.

Pinyons would be unaffordable if Wolf-god hadn’t made the cones easy to reach.  Source.

Sources (in addition to links in post)

Lanner, RM.  1981.  The piñon pine, a natural and cultural history.  University of Nevada Press, Reno.