Champion Klamath Foxtail Pine

Champion Klamath foxtail pine

Pinus balfouriana subspecies balfouriana

In 2010, I first found this tree while backpacking through the Trinity Alps Wilderness in far northern California. Just last week, thirteen years later, my son Sylas and I returned with tools to officially measure and nominate this tree. While points fell just short of the overall champion, it is the second largest foxtail pine known and the largest of the subspecies of the Klamath foxtail pine (Pinus balfouriana subsp. balfouriana).

It measures 24’ circumference 84’ tall 44’ crown spread for 383 AF points. CLICK for how to measure a tree.

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Engelmann Spruce and Subalpine Fir in California

Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir form one of the most common forest associations in the Rocky Mountains and parts of the Cascades. In California, this is one of our rarest subalpine forest vegetation alliances. These two species occur in only a few places in the state–often not even together unlike in the rest of their range. We recently visited the Russian Wilderness for a trail working trip and I became re-familiarized with these two wonderful tree species.

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Five-Needle Pines Community Science Project

As a board member of the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation, I decided to help cook up this project because all is not well with the five-needle pines of western North America.

Five-needle pines along the Pacific Crest Trail include the sugar pine, limber pine, foxtail pine, whitebark pine, and western white pine. Crucial to the mountain ecosystems where they occur, these trees face an uncertain future, and scientists are trying to learn more.

You can help and are invited

Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation has partnered with the California Native Plant Society and the Pacific Crest Trail Association to raise awareness about the plight of five-needle pines and conduct this community science project. The goal is to get thru-, section-hikers, and everyone who visits to the trail to map and inventory five-needle pines along the Pacific Crest Trail.

By participating, you will help increase awareness of the changes affecting our world while improving connections to nature. Working together to document what’s happening is a positive step toward recovery.

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Trees in the Desert

Exploring the Mojave National Preserve

Mojave National Preserve Park Service Map

Established in 1994, the Mojave National Preserve encompasses 1.6 million acres roughly bounded by Interstates 15 and 40. Most simply pass by this region on their way to other places (Lost Wages, Nevada for example) but it is a premier desert park. This vast and varied landscape includes dunes, dry lakebeds, granites, volcanics (domes, lava flows, and cinder cones), limestones, and sedimentary deposits which support a diverse collection of plants. The preserve includes creosote bush lowlands at 880 feet near Baker all the way up to conifer woodlands at 7,929 feet on the summit of Clark Mountain. The Mojave Wilderness is 700,000 acres of the preserve.

Within the preserve is the University of California Riverside’s Sweeney Granite Mountains Desert Research Center. The University of California’s GMDRC is dedicated to academic research and teaching and access is solely through an application approval process. This was was our basecamp. I am working on a book with Philip Rundel and Bob Patterson called California Desert Plants (Backcountry Press, late 2022) so we came to experience, explore, photograph, and write about the regional wonders. In particular, we wanted to find trees in the desert.

Trees in the desert framing the Granite Mountains Desert Research Center.
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