SF New Mexican:
Study: Warming, drought, harmful to pinon trees. A little late for us folks east of Santa Fe. The piñons died off a few years ago. A dry pine can’t push out enough sap to encapsulate and kill beetles. Only ones in proximity to a water source survived (Arroyo Hondo, near El Gancho, still has a swath, because of the close-to-the-surface water table beneath). Read more about our 2004 die-off here, written in the midst of the invasion.
The road from Santa Fe to the Glorieta Pass is black with dead pines. They’re starting to fall over now, rotten and termite-eaten at the bases. If this is what is in store for the rest of the West’s pine trees, our states are no longer going to be places of beauty.
Comments:
It’s hard for me to see the forest for the dead trees.
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
Probably 2/3rds of the Rockies I was in last year are covered with dead pine.
Some mitigating good news, if you get to them before the termites and rot do, the fungus that follows the beetle leaves a purple path through the wood that is just loverly.
And what better memento to keep from this time than a photo of what it looked like and a piece of furniture that allows visual explanation of the process that killed them off.
Flip side, from someone who lived with clear-cut timbering of pine. The next generation will be in soon, pinion I don’t know as well; but we used to leave a “sentinel” pine on the peak of a clearcut and be up to our asses in pine once again within years.
So embrace a different beauty in this time of change.