As may be apparent, my current project area is a pine site near Emery, Utah. There are many younger trees, but the oldest material is more than 500 years old. I have a few pith dates from dead wood cross sections from the 1400s (below), but the oldest live tree I've found is this one (above). It is also the largest at 41 inches. I've been unable to conclusively cross date the cores, so the true dates are probably plus or minus five, but my estimate is that the tree germinated around 1520.
I went to my project area at the top of Link Canyon yesterday. I was coring my first tree, the second core, when I got the increment borer stuck. I eventually retrieved it from the tree, but it was completely plugged. Useless until I can drill it out. Oh well, at least I had the saw. On my second cross section, a stump, I got through it only to find a piece of rebar in the wood. Great. Now the chain was completely dull, and I didn't have a spare. Two hours from Price and the tools are shot. It goes to show that, when you're working in ponderosa, you need to have two or three of everything.
It has been quiet at this newspaper for a while. One of things I've been working on is the dating of a stump from a (possibly) culturally modified tree (ponderosa pine) from Joes Valley. Twenty-years ago, one of the local archaeologists cut a piece of wood from a dead tree that they identified as a CMT. They placed it in a cardboard box and noted that it could provide evidence of the dates of Native American peeling. I found it last week. So far as I could tell, it had not been touched for two decades, and certainly no one had tried to date it. I sanded it and went to work (above). But, as archaeologists like to complain: It was out of context. What part of the tree was it? To work that out, I joined our current archaeologist in locating the stump last week (below). The red line shows where the wood had been removed. For anyone interested in dating a piece of dead wood, that wasn't the best way to do it. But, just knowing how it was cut has helped me a lot. I now have a tentative pith date of 1585.
Last time we tried to go to White Pine Lake, VSO was just five weeks removed from major surgery at St. Mark's Hospital. I was worried about her and turned her around early . . . so she didn't quite see the lake. Today, she made the seven and a half mile out and back in three and a half hours. And, I have proof: She is one of the two supermodels below.
Yesterday, EDO took me to the Wellsvilles. I've never been there before, so it was good to visit. Because the weather was cold and wet and because the parking lot was closed, there were only two other people out there, and we didn't see anything but their tracks. It was nice. Nice and quiet, which is probably not the usual case anywhere in the Cache Valley.
EDO said that she heard somewhere that the Wellsvilles are the steepest range in the state. We know about the Pahvant, but I don't doubt that this is similar. We walked for 75 minutes and it was straight uphill the whole way. The idea was that we would make it to the ridge, but the trail was slippery and the clouds were low: It was going to be dark before we could top out. We went down instead.
