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Zone of Combat
| Article
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20371 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
1,331 Words |
| Author
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Branley Allan Branson
Branley Allan Branson is professor of biology emeritus at
Eastern Kentucky University and editor of the Transactions of
the Kentucky Academy of Science. |
Scientists have teetered precariously along the ridges of Mount Washington in New Hampshire and challenged waist-deep snows to observe the edge of the forest. They have faced the spring sleet at 10,000 feet in the Montana Rockies. From those travails, they have learned much about timberlines, about the zone of crippling and the effects of weather, soils, and protection on forest life.
But many scientists (and nonscientists) want to make their own observations of the timberline for aesthetic reasons as well, for there is a kind of surrealistic beauty that is encountered only at edges. The edge of the sea is one such place; the transition zone between plains and forests is another; and then there is the timberline, a fascinating zone of tension between the high, treeless places and the normal forests below.
Visitors to the mountaintop who ignore this are missing out on one of the keys to understanding mountain biology and also depriving themselves of some fine aesthetic experiences. To walk through a Colorado timberline forest, for example, is like stepping into an entirely different phase of existence. The grotesquely twisted and deformed trees with a little imagination can look very demonical.
But, for the most part, timberline trees are merely curious and admirable survivors in a nearly absolutely antagonistic and precarious environment.
With its superabundance of high mountains, western North America is surfeited with practically every aspect of timberline ecology, Of course, the more southerly the location, the higher the timberline. Thus, in northwest Washington State, the "krumholz" or area of tree crippling may be encountered at only 5,000 feet. By contrast, in the southern Rocky Mountains one must climb to 10,000 feet or higher to observe timberlines, although the exact altitudes are a bit erratic according to exposure and soil structure.
Only a few survive
There are not a great many species of trees living at the timberline at any given latitude, but the ones that are there, like whitebark pine, Douglas fir, limber pine, and Englemann spruce, are hardy to the extreme. Although practically all phases of the transition from full forest to the treeless tundra may be observed at places like Rocky Mountain National Park or on Mount Washington, a peak in New Hampshire's Presidential Range, it is the upper limits of the forests that
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