Bristlecone Pine

There are forest stands in the Wet Mountains of southern Colorado that are composed of nothing but Engelmann spruce. Nothing. For tens of acres, if not hundreds, one can wander through the woods and see nothing but spruce. These are remarkably uniform and homogeneous forests. At Rural Ways we've not really seen anything like it. In southern Utah, the predominant forest species of the high elevation plateaus over the past couple of hundred years has been Engelmann spruce, but it is intermixed with sub-alpine fir and aspen. Sub-alpine fir is not rare in southern Utah; in the Wets, it took me four days of looking to find three individual fir trees.

What a surprise then, to stumble on this stand of bristlecone pine. The stand initiated 80 to 100 years ago after a wildfire. While there is still a lot of spruce, the pine makes up more than half of the stems. It is on a steep, rocky, south and west facing slope at about 11,000 feet. The pines are germinating and regenerating . . . often the work of squirrels and birds that cache the seeds for food . . . but the stand is also infested with white pine blister rust. Over time, there is hope for the development of blister rust resistant pine genotypes, but in many cases there is no time. The pine forests of Colorado have been heavily infested with Mountain Pine Beetle (MPB) over the past five years, causing extensive mortality. For small, high-elevation, five-needle pine stands, like this one, the one-two punch of white pine blister rust and MPB can virtually eliminate them from the landscape. Then all we'll have is more spruce.