Opinion: ‘Lostish’

We wandered around in the woods the other day, not exactly by design.

I needed a photo to go with a story so we ran up to Cedar Flats, which is snow-free, unlike Glacier National Park.

I’m a bit tired of postholing and even more tired of skiing on icy snow, so it was good to just be able to walk on the Earth, the wet dirt squishing beneath your feet.

We headed up a trail which has a name that I forget. It’s a multiuse trail, which means that motorcycles use it as well has hikers and bicyclists. I don’t know how all this works in practice, since I rarely hike up there, but suffice it to say the trail was wide and cleared, so it was easy walking.

We didn’t go far, however, before I took a hard left turn into the woods and started to wander around. The woods has been thinned by F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber under contract with the Forest Service and I have to admit, it looks pretty good.

The treatments aren’t harsh and the walking was easy. They’ve left a lot of big Doug fir and I even found a big white pine, a survivor of blister rust.

I like white pine and I hope, as a species, they persist, despite rust. This tree looked to be what they call a “plus” tree — a tree that has genetic resistance to the rust fungal infection that killed most of its kin over the years.

Foresters like plus trees. They propagate the seeds from them and then replant the seedlings, the hope being that the seedlings also have the rust resistance.

Glacier National Park has done a lot of this with whitebark pine and the Forest Service has done it as well.

In Glacier, the white pine plus trees are doing the propagating on their own. In woods around Apgar there’s some old white pine and plenty of young white pine as well.

The lodgepole forest that was planted by the Civilian Conservation Corps back in the ‘30s is reaching the end of its lifespan and is slowly, but surely, dying.

The white pine are trying to come back naturally, but it’s a slow process. More than a few young trees that had rust last summer died after it got too dry.

A little drought stress seemed to make the rust more fatal. Typically it’s a slow death, but these trees died quickly.

White pine does have something going for it, however. They start making cones at about age 15, which is fairly young for a tree. So if they can reach that age, even if the rust kills them, the species should persist.

I’ll never see a mature white pine forest in my lifetime.

As far as the walk was concerned, we wandered much farther than I thought, not exactly lost, but not exactly on the right track, either. We came out on the road a good mile and half away from the truck.

It snowed, it rained and the sun shone all in the course of a few hours.

In other words, it was just about perfect.