5-5-12 Tuckerman Ravine Pilgrimage (additions on 5-14-12))

Tuckerman Ravine has been pulling at me since mid-winter. There was a time when I was there every weekend and holiday from February to June all the way through the 1960s and part of the 1970s. In the early 1960s it was permissible to camp around Hermit Lake and and across the Cutler River towards Boott Spur.  We'd set up a tent in our favorite spot and use it on weekends. On Friday nights  dozens of skiers headed up the Fire Trail in the dark, or moonlight, to get an early on the weekend. There were parties every night (the French Canadian contingency often playing host) we'd ski (or ice climbing) all day rain or shine (or blizzard) Saturday and Sunday. I was second generation. My parents had spent weekends skiing there for years and years. I was 5 the first time I climbed up tp the Ravine. It means that for 64 years I've been hiking to Tucks pretty regularly. It's in my blood. Liz, my daughter, and I have had a number of false starts the past few months. We were finally able to get up North and on the Fire Trail Saturday morning, 5-5-12, for a quick trip without skis or snowboard; just a camera and mainly to say hello to Johannes and to document the snow levels in the Ravine and surrounding snowfields.

The Cutler River, which drains Tuckerman Ravine, sounded like a freight train Saturday morning as it pounded down towards Pinkham Notch fed by snow and ice that's melting from the recent spate of warm weather.

 

The morning started out a bit dreary. Pinkham Notch was closed in by fog and everything was grey. The Fire Trail is not my favorite trail. In some ways it's the "death march" thing, that and having hiked it, run it, and crawled parts of it close to 2,000 times. That's not really something I'm proud of and I mention it in passing as a way of saying, "I know every dam stone in this trail."

I think you get the idea.

Having company helps with the tedium. This couple was originally from Marseille, France, and now they're living in Montreal, PQ. It was their first time on Mt. Washington and they were aiming for the summit.

A veteran Tucks skier who's been skiing the Ravine for about 20 years gleefully on his way up.

I refer to this section of the Fire Trail as Moonlight Serenade after the Glen Miller Orchestra theme song because the stretch of trail is so lyrical on nights in the winter and spring when the full moon is so bright and you stop in your tracks to look around at the sparkling ridges and summits and listen to the incredible silence. In the photo the summit of Mt. Washington is straight ahead and has snow on it (and a little to the left next to the tree ). The narrow ribbon of snow below it is Raymond Cataract.

This was quite a group. I got the impression it was a single family and they were on their way to Tucks for the day. They're resting on Third Bridge which is about 3/4 of the way up to Tucks. It's become fashionable in recent years to spell it as "Tux" when refering to Tuckerman.

A remnant of snow hugs the shady side of the trail.

Another hiker making a day trip to the summit.
 
 

Up over a small knoll and here's your first glimpse of the "bowl". It's still a thrill. I would be embarrassed to say that if I didn't know I am one of possibly thousands of people who are strongly attached (and dedicated) to this place for its natural beauty and uniqueness and for all the friendships that were fostered here. It's home to a lot of skiers and mountaineers. 

We got to the shelter just as the morning mist was clearing off. The shelter is the current home of Caretaker Johannes Grieshammer and his assistant, Tom, who were both busy Saturday hooking up the water line to the kitchen (hot water!) after a winter of hauling buckets of water a couple of hundred yards from the hand pump.

 

There wasn't much traffic when we arrived. The early birds were already skiing up in the bowl and the groups on the sun deck were gearing up for the mile long hike up to the Ravine or the two mile hike to the summit.

 

The trail to the Ravine passes through a haunted forest before beginning a steep ascent to the First Aid Cache at the mouth of the Ravine. It's a strenuous climb that offers ample rewards like this view of Boott Spur and (below) a great view of the Carter-Moriah Range with Carter Dome rising in the middle.

It took me a second to grasp the large area of fresh gravel and boulders in the bottom left of this photo and then I realized that it is part of a slide started by the torrential rains of Hurricane Irene back in August of 2011. It's clearly a huge amount of debris that came down Hillman Highway and the more vertical gullies, like Dodge's Drop, that plunge down Boott Spur towards Hillman's. Dougy Dodd was on Boott Spur the day following Irene. He hiked up to Lakes of the Clouds and came back down through Tuckerman Ravine and commented that it was hard to imagine how vast the volume of water was that poured down the mountain during the storm but the slide gives you a good idea. That is a lot of tons of sand and stone.

No matter what you think or how young, or fit you feel, packing to the Ravine is toil, purely and simply. Every person who strains up this grade probably wishes, however briefly, for the existence of a chair lift.

There have been a few discussions over the years about developing the mountain as a commercial ski area but no plans were ever drawn up. The argument against was the awful weather that the mountain is famous for and that could easily devour inexperienced skiers on the upper slopes. It is unlikely, if not assuredly impossible, that the mountain will ever be developed as a commercial ski area.

Skiing the high, steep slopes, ravines and gullies in the Presidential Range requires expert skill and above-average strength both of which are best served, not with ski lifts, but by climbing. This skier's expression says it well. He's dog tired; leaning on his poles and gulping for air but his eyes are on the prize that's just over the next rise, or maybe the one after that.

This could be the trail to Shangri La.

Liz has got the bouldering bug and has to stop at every rock to test her skill.

The view from one of the boulders included the Carter Range, again, and a better view of Wildcat Ski Area in the center of the photo where you can see very small patches of snow that are left on some of the trails. It feels odd, so early in May, to see no snow anywhere below 4,000 feet.

To be continued....

Since the 1920s Tuckerman Ravine has been a place where skiers come to enjoy a challenging mountain run but many also come to cut their teeth and push themselves to their limits in both courage and steepness as a means to test their mastery. Many Olympic skiers have developed strength and style here over the years and the Olympic trials were even held here in the 1950s.

This spring the best skiing has been in Left Gulley. You can see a number of skiers coming down. The Chute is to the right and you can see skiers hiking up. No two years are alike in terms of the distribution of snow in Tuckerman. It depends on local weather events; wind primarily. Some storms come in from the southeast (as the major storm of early February 2010) or from the north, northwest, etc. An important facet of snow accumulation in the bowl is that big storms do dump a lot of snow, but it is the wind raking across the slopes above that contributes the most snow. Another facet is that the March and April are often the months with the most snow accumulation here.

Looking up at the center left headwall. Two US Forest Service volunteers are in the foreground. The forest service has developed a very effective public outreach program in which they try to talk, at least briefly, with everyone that comes into the bowl on a given day to point out where it's safe to ski, where the ice looks sketchy, etc.. This effort has reduced accidents by 80-90 percent. Each spring the amount of snow and the length of time it lingers is a signature of the past winter. In mid-June 1969 the Ravine looked like in does in these photos. The longest period of time the snow has lasted that there records of was in the fall, winter, spring, summer and fall of 1926-1927. The Snow Arch was still standing in late September 1927 but regrettably, to some, the snow completely melted in a warm October. For the "some" there's eternal hope that one of these years some snow, even a few shovels full, will last a year so we can yell that the glacier is back.

Looking up at the "Lip". In 1969, 1996 and again in 1999 the lip stayed open into late May and early June. In 1996 I hauled my skis down the Fire Trail for the last time on June 14th. The volume of snow is important for skiers but so is the texture. Ideally, cold nights and clear, cool days sustains the snow the longest and is the wish. Fog, as in low clouds, with a wind tends to eat snow faster than any other single element. Rain is second and intense sun, hot days is third.

As has already been reported in this blog Tuckerman Ravine is a glacial cirque. It has attained a great deal of notoriety for the skiing/snowboarding but also as an iconic glacial feature. The bowl shape is the cue. It was assumed to be a glacial cirque more than 100 years ago and I believe it was in July, 1879, that William Pickering, a Harvard geologist, made a perfectly straight line with large and even- sized rocks across the entire bowl about 2/3 of the way up the headwall. He observed and measured them every day as long as the snow lasted. The experiment demonstrated that the stones were carried down the wall and that the ones towards the center moved faster than those on the wings. This was his proof that a glacier could have carved Tuckerman.

 

A skier coming down in the center of the Ravine with the rocks of the actual "headwall" towering above him. After Pickering, it took another 70 years before geologists were pretty much in agreement that Tuckerman, and several other ravines and "gulfs" are true glacial cirques and that they were carved by small, local, alpine glaciers that resided here for hundreds of thousands of years. The local, alpine glaciers were overridden tens of thousands of years ago by the last continental ice sheet, the "Wisconsinan", which also contributed to the present shapes of the cirques. The other cirques delineated include Great Gulf and Madison Gulf (possibly one glacier between them), Huntington Ravine, King Ravine, Castle Ravine, and a small cirque-like formation in Oakes Gulf. The cirques occupy the east and north facing slopes of the Presidential Range because of the directions of the prevailing winds.

So the prevailing winds of a specific winter determine, along with the amount of snow that falls, the amount of snow in the ravines. The winter of 2011-2012 has been one of the lightest snow years on record and it shows in this photo taken midway up the headwall looking up towards the Lip and the huge slabs of rocks that are exposed.

This and the 3 following photos were added on 5-14-12 for readers who have never been in Tuckerman Ravine to ski or hike and hopefully these photos will give a better sense of the steepness of the headwall and what it's like to be on the Headwall itself. The above photo was taken near the top of Left Gulley in 1984 near the end of the day. The shadow on the snow in the foreground is a signal that the sun is leaving the Ravine and it's time to descend as the snow will begin to freeze and will be difficult to ski in. On those hot, sunny days in April and May, by mid-afternoon, the snow turns into heavy "mashed potatoes" which are also difficult to ski in.

Looking from Right Gulley across the headwall at the continuous line of skiers hiking up to the Lip. This gives you an idea of how steep the center of the bowl is. The Lip, where the skiers are climbing towards, is a bit steeper. Skiing over the Lip gives you the illusion that you are skiing vertically but it's actually only about 60 degrees but steep enough. There are some gulleys that are  steeper and certainly one of the draws of both the Ravine and a few of the skiable gulleys on Boott Spur are the "steeps". Dodge's Drop and the Duchess are two steep runs that are popular on Boott Spur. In the Ravine, the center rocks on the headwall and the Sluice are also challenging. Many of the skiers in this photo will continue on above the lip to take a few runs on the summit snow fields before skiing down over the Lip into the bowl. You can tell the age of these photos because there are no snowboarders in the Ravine. By the early 1990s they'd be everywhere in the Ravine and gulleys. 

A racer in the 1982 running of the Inferno ski race in Tuckerman Ravine tries to navigate in thick fog. This and the photo below were taken on the Headwall a few minutes apart during the first running of the Inferno since 1952. It would be a serious omission if I didn't mention the Inferno as it's yet another feature of the Ravine that has made it world famous. In the 1982 version of the race it started on the snowfields above the lip and ended in the bowl. In the first running of the race, in 1933, it started on the summit, descended the summit snowfields to the Lip, then over the Lip, down the Headwall and across the bowl to the Little Headwall and down the Sherburne Ski Trail to the AMC's Pinkham Notch Camp (Appalachia, June 1933). You can get the idea why the "Inferno".

"

(Photo: A racer in the 1982 Inferno wipes out.) The 1933 Inferno was well attended and it was decided to hold the race again in 1934 (when it was won by Dick Durrance a young Dartmouth skier) and again in 1939. In the 1939 Inferno one skier, 19 year old Toni Matt, made history by taking the Headwall on a straight course (afterwards the race blamed it on a miscalculation) and, being the first person to "schuss" the Headwall, was able to keep control of his skis all the way to and then down the Little Headwall and on down the Sherburne. He finished the run in 6 minutes 29 seconds cutting the best time in the 1934 Inferno in half. It was an amazing feat by any standard. In 1982 the race was shortened and gates were added so that racers would be forced to stay in control and none would be tempted (or able) to win fame and fortune by following in Toni's tracks. Toni worked winters in the ski shop  at Carroll Reed's in North Conway and in the early 1950s, when I was a kid there, Toni could still enthrall his admirers, including this writer, with animated retellings of his history making schuss down the infamous Headwall. The Inferno was attempted one more time, in 1952, but course was shortened and not the same summit-to-bottom race because of bad weather.

This is the area of the Headwall that has a fatal charm. It is certainly not the only source of deadly missiles of ice but it is the primary one. Ice building up on the rocks in the late fall and early winter of the preceding year begins to melt and insolation warms up the rocks as they emerge from the snow pack in the middle to late spring. The Forest Service has spent a great deal of effort over past decades in mechanically controlling the ice fall (as in shooting it down when there's no one in the Ravine, as well as educating skiers, snowboarders and hikers, the exact dangers presented by the ice. I was present in 1959 when a skier was hit by a large piece of ice very close to where I was standing when I took this photo last Saturday. The skier died while being carried down to the road. I have also witnessed, and taken part in umpteen rescues, skiers getting hit by falling ice and/or sliding headfirst into the rocks and sustaining fractured skulls, punctured lungs, broken appendages, etc. It is one of the hazards of skiing in Tuckerman and, of course, to some it makes skiing in the Ravine more "fun" or macho. The forest service is to be given much credit and applause for their successful efforts in decreasing deaths and severe injuries (all injuries) in the past 20 years.

Getting closer to the lip. At this point a basketball-sized chunk of ice whizzed to my left. When ice breaks from the rock it sometimes make a loud cracking sound like a rifle but sometimes it doesn't. There is usually someone watching vigilantly who yells the alarm "ICE!, ICE!" with the location of the track it is taking. Sometimes skiers out race the ice but I've watched helplessly as skiers ski right into the path of the falling ice. The ice picks up incredible speed so it makes it difficult to sit and think what the best evasive action might be. You kind of have to move on instinct.

In this photo, where I was lying on the snow to take it, the main item is the water that was seen cascading down over the lip, emerging here for a moment before descending down across the floor of the ravine under the snow pack. It's a lot of water, but also a hot day, or becoming a hot day. Where I was lying I could hear the roar of the water a foot, or so, below me under the snow and ice. It's a bit eerie.

Here's that bowl shape, a definition of a cirque, in the two opposing walls curving down to the Little Headwall. Just sliding around in our boots, called boot skiing, was great fun. The snow was perfect in texture. One good thing about the snow this year is the long runout from the headwall across the floor of the Ravine which increases safety a lot. In all of the above photos of the Ravine I am struck by the apparent density and height of the vegetation, the alders and birch and in some places balsam fir. It is just conjecture but it seems to be denser and taller but maybe the lack of snow depth gives it that illusion.

Liz inhaling the smell of balsam.

The Ravine is host to a lot of interesting characters who each have a story or two to tell about a close call or a particularly challenging ski, or ride, down a stretch of steep snow. One wonders where the truth begins and ends during some of these tales. The tales I like start by the teller asking you how long you've been coming to the Ravine each spring as a way of finding out what you might be willing to believe and how far he, or she, can stretch it.

It was great to see Johannes Griesshammer, the Tux Caretaker, and to hang out for awhile. The last time we crossed paths was at Zealand back in October 2010. He was at the new Madison Hut last summer (2011) where he served as hut naturalist. We've been sharing interest in several things: geology, glaciers, bushwhacking, and the origin(s) of the northern forest which add up to endless discussions.

Tom, Assistant Caretaker

The trail down.

Vortex of icy water in the Cutler River at Third Bridge. I dare you!

4-30-12 Pemigewasset Wilderness (complete)

 North Branch of the Pemigewasset River above Still Water Jct., June 1961

As I write this the month of May is an hour away and if the last three months is any indication of how fast time flies summer is not far away. The vicissitudes of last summer prevented me from hiking as much as I had hoped and now I am craving the pleasure of being in the mountains. I feel exactly as I did as a teenager when I would dream through each school day of exploring every nook and cranny of the mountains; places like the Pemigewasset Wilderness which, just by its name, sounded every bit as romantic as the rivers and forests around Hudson Bay, the Adirondacks, or the Selkirks in British Columbia. When I passed my driver's exam at the age of 16 it was only a matter of hours before I was driving north. One of my favorite destinations was the Willey House Station in Crawford Notch and the southern trail head of the Ethan Pond Trail. I'd hike to the height of land where the scent of sun baked balsam needles filled my nostrils and I was in heaven.

Looking west across Ethan Pond towards the Bonds, July 1958.

From the height of land the Ethan Pond Trail heads due west and then curves north through Zealand Notch. From this point the illusion is of a vast table land surrounded and made insular by ranges of mountains like the Willeys, Zealand Mt. and Zeacliff, the Twins, Mts. Nancy and Bemis, Mt. Carrigain, the Hancocks, and the Franconia Ridge, etc. In 1961 the "Pemi" felt wild. It was definitely underutilized. I rarely passed other hikers here even on summer weekends and when I did they surprised me, or rather we surprised each other. Once I passed Charlie Swift, the father of two hut croo members that I knew, and I was so unprepared to see another soul that when he came around a clump of alders I jumped like someone coming upon a moose, or bear, might.

                                                              Zealand Notch from Ethan Pond, July 1959.

My plans for this summer (2012) include 1.) locating the "stations" (locations) of all (or most) of the rare Saxifrages on the Presidential Range, 2.) spending a lot of time in old haunts like King and Castle Ravines, and 3.) getting "off trail" again in the Pemi by traversing areas where I've never been. I've mentioned a bushwhack I want to attempt starting from Lincoln, NH, and going up over Mt. Coolidge, down into Lincoln Brook, over Owls Head and the Twin-Bond ridge and coming out somewhere around the Bretton Woods ski area on Rt. 302 (or continue over Mts. Desolation and Dartmouth). This will take me through areas that were heavily logged 100 plus years ago, and areas that weren't. One goal is to find out what it was like to travel in this country before there were trails. 

Whitewall Brook with Zealand Mt. (left) and Zeacliff in the background 

    from the Ethan Pond Trail just south of Zealand Notch. Photo from July 1959.  

Another goal of the bushwhack is to look at the forest from a different perspective then I'm (most of us) used to.  We hike comfortably along well developed trails for the most part. For the purpose of understanding the origin of the present day forests in the "Pemi" I'd like to look at the forest from the forest's perspective; to see it close up for a better understanding of its component parts: soils-geology, slope-aspect, plant diversity, and precipitation-water run-off.   

At the beginning of this blog I announced that the motivation behind it was to better understand the reality of the vast glacial sheet that covered the White Mountains for 30,000 years, or so, and that vacated this region about 11,000 years ago. I was standing on top of Mt.Adams one morning and probably for the first time was really hit over the head with the idea of the glacier being there at one time: the immense scale and depth; the vastness of it. During the past 3-4 years I've found it difficult to separate the glacier's existence from the existence of the present-day forest. In my mind's eye they  go together and I'd like to find an hypothesis for why I feel that way. Is the forest somehow proof that the glacier really was here (as if we needed proof), a different kind of proof then glacial erratics on top of Mt. Jefferson and the glacially carved cirques, roches moutonnees, and striated bedrock.

As to the evolution of the modern forest which so intrigues me I've been reading from books and the popular press a lot about seeds, glacial relects, and the possible relationship between the continental ice sheets and the present day "northern" forests of which the Pemigewasset Wilderness is a part. 

It seems that I am not the only one who is curious about the history of present day forests and their relationship to the last glacier particularly melted back and exposed the bare rock and barely fertile glacial till, the sand and gravel and other detritus that remained when the glacier was removed. An interesting article from the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17100574 , described how seeds believed to be 35,000 years old found at a periglacial site in Siberia were successfully germinated. Another BBC article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17258799 reports how "alien seeds threaten Antarctic fringes". The seeds in this case are transported to Antarctica on the boots of tourists and scientists. Clothing, including shoes, were also vehicles by which a lot of European plants like lambs quarters, all the docks (Curly, Yellow, Burdock--like the three stooges) were brought to North America in the first years of the Colonies allegedly in the hems of women's dresses. Clothing is still a newly adapted vehicle for seeds of invasive plants, like the dandelions, that are beginning to appear in the Alpine Zone of the White Mountains.

Nancy Pond, February 1983

The origin of the present day forests that we've become familiar with in northeastern North America: generally in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and northeastern Canada, originally came from seeds and and via the mechanics of seed dispersion. Knowing that still leaves the questions that I formulated on top of Adams that July morning: what did the White Mountains look a thousand years before the day the glacier finally melted down to its extinction? What did the landscape look like on that day? What was here? What had taken place during the long phase of melting? Did the glacier deposit organic material it had taken up on its descent from the far northern latitudes? Were there seeds in the detritus that was left behind by the "retreating" glacier? Was the glacial till fertile enough to support plants? Did the forest take hold on till and areas of muskeg exposed as the glacier melted through its last 1000 years? Or did it take thousands of years and many "successions" of biotic communities before the forest we see now became dominant?  We know that saber toothed tigers, mammoths and huge bison roamed the White Mountains while the glacier shrank but those types of animals became extinct soon after the glacier's demise giving some proof that climates changed dramatically during the time that the forest was evolving. How did the forest adapt?

The following photos taken recently from the summit of Mt. Carrigain cover an arc of 180 degrees that show the northern areas of the Pemigewasset Wilderness. The above photo is towards the west and in the center background is Mt. Osceola and, to the right, the sharp summit of North Hancock.

This photo is looking across the Pemi at the Franconia Ridge. The large "Y" shaped slide track is between Mt. Lafayette and Mt. Lincoln. A ridge of Mt. Moosilauke, not part of the wilderness area, is on the left edge of the photo while a ridge of Mt. Bond and Bondcliffs which are close to the center of the wilderness area are on the right edge of the photo.

This photo shows, so well, the undulations of the mountains and the forested areas of the Pemi, and it's beauty. Mt. Lafayette is at the left hand edge of the photo and is the western boundary of the wilderness area. North and South Twin are in the center background with the Bonds close by. Mt. Hale is close to the right hand edge of the photo. This photo, alone, depicts two-thirds of the breadth of the Pemi and one sees it as diminutive; much smaller than anything called a "wilderness" west of the Mississippi, but, at the same time, it is a "modern" remnant of an ancient forest far larger than even our collective imaginations can contain; vast, dark with immense conifers 3-4 feet in diameter and contingents of alders, birches and a few other hardwoods in some wet areas or on south slopes . It was probably strikingly beautiful and teeming with life which, in itself, must have been rich in diversity given the thousands of years it kept this land, this place, and this idea about what a forest means to us.

The photos above and those below are meant to give you a sense of place by way of showing the scale and the textures of the Pemi.  From this height it's hard to feel the diversity it contains and from the ground it's difficult to feel the scale. It is a forest ecosystem with its own natural boundaries as well as the artificial one put in place by the federal government. The two are nearly congruent which is important when trying to imagine the shape and size of the Pemi. The photo is looking up through Zealand Notch towards Mt. Hale, left of center, and Cherrry Mountain in the center background.

 

This photo nicely includes the forest with the reminders of the glacial presence in this area. Crawford Notch in the center of the photo is a beautiful glacially carved valley and behind it is the Presidential Range, with Mt. Washington the highest peak, that was the focus, beginning more than 100 years ago, for understanding the complex geology of these peaks and if and when continental glaciers did indeed shape and scar this entire landscape. It took years for the proof to emerge and it is still being tested.

Then, there is the green carpet, almost unbroken, of the forest that has come to reside here. Standing on the summit of Mt. Carrigain to take this photo is a reminder that about 100 years ago the summit of Carrigain had been cut of all its trees and the whole landscape seen in this series of photos taken from Carrigain, was denuded of nearly every tree by horrific lumbering operations. The forest prior to the rogue lumbering must have been remarkable as the forest of today is remarkable. It's healthy and has proved its resilience.


Going back to the question of its emergence from under and around the last glacial ice sheet, the hows and wheres, are daunting. Clearly seeds can travel easily almost anywhere on the planet to take root where conditions are favorable or just nearly favorable. It's usually all trial and error unless its the apple falling to the ground at the base of the tree. In the recent news article the vehicle was the shoes of tourists but it could be the fur of a fox, the hoof of a moose, wind, a flood, or a glacier or a whole series of things:wind, water, the stomach of a deer, more water, a squirrel, a hawk, a boat, a bale of hay, etc. If you put a cylinder of sticky paper and hung it 6 feet above the summit of Mt. Everest and came back in a month, or two, took the cylinder down the mountains and looked at the surface you would find fine, light seeds that circle the earth on jet streams. Seeds are everywhere.


Researchers at a site along the Kolyma River in Siberia found some seeds that had been buried in old squirrel burrows in an area that has been under permafrost for between 30,000 and 35,000 years. The dating was partly based on findings of "the bones of large mammals, such as mammoths, wooly rhinoceros, bison, horses, deer and other representatives of fauna from the age of the mammoths as well as plant remains. The floral material included seeds and placental tissue (ed. ovaries) from Silene sternophyla, a member of the Campion family, and the researchers were able to germinate living, healthy specimens from the ovaries of these plants. They reported that the next oldest seeds to have been germinated were 2000-year old palm seeds from Israel." (BBC, op. cit.)

North end of the Carrigain Notch Trail that follows an old logging railroad bed, June 2003.

The 35,000 year old seeds found in Siberia that were viable (at least they could be germianted under special conditions in a laboratory) may be significant in the context of the Wisonsinan glaciation that occurred here in the White Mountains, but first, it needs to be pointed out that 35, 000 years sounds like a very long period of time, but in the life of a plant species it's not. Usually plants evolve at a much slower pace which is not to say plant genotypes cannot change "quickly" when survival prescribes adaptation.

Another facet of this "problem"  is the ice sheet itself during that same, long period of time. Theories differ but it seems more than likely that it would have been going through major fluctuations, all kinds of changes, corresponding to climate changes. The term being used recently is that the continental ice sheet was "static" meaning not staying the same size either in width or depth throughout its history. It moved down from the Laurentides, stopped, began to shrink, grew some more, then began shrinking again, stopping for long periods, then alternating with major thickenings of the ice in turn adding to the pressure pushing it southward.

That morning I stood on the summit of Adams I was trying to envision the ice possibly as 7000 feet thick, or 1000 feet higher than where I was standing. Clearly I was thinking of something different and apart from reality: a vast uniform "continent" of ice like Antarctica or the Greenland Ice Cap, with uniform thickness, like a huge pancake or a vanilla cake. In retrospect, I wasn't paying attention to detail or how the ice sheet would really look after all the fluctuations like the movement, time,  changes in weather/climate, etc.

For instance, Nunataks, which are high points of land that appear as islands of rock and soil in the ice sheet, would emerge during when the ice sheet shrank. The nunataks could possibly have served as   refuge (refugia) by the plants.  These plants, in the post glacial period, would repopulate the areas vacated by the glacier as it fluctuated. Another possibility, pushing the idea of nunataks aside, is that plant species survived in the periglacial areas adjacent to the glacier and methodically repopulated those areas vacated by the glacier as it shrank. Imagine the Presidential Range of the White Mountains as a nunatak and a refuge for alpine/arctic plants.

Going back to the seeds from the Kolmya region I'm curious whether a species of plants born from viable seeds frozen in the ice sheet for, say, 35,000 years would be able to survive very long if they were not exposed to adaptions to dramatic climactic and environmental changes occurring during that period of time?  Factors such as frost hardiness loom large in the discussion as does the question of whether the seeds in the ice were actually frozen and whether the bottom strata of the ice sheet, subjected to huge pressure, might have a higher coefficient of plasticity.

I found a research paper published on the Web looks at the "survival strategies of glacial relects" in the the Black Forest in southern Germany in Alnus viridis, or "green alder", a species of Alder with a large population in north central Quebec and that grows here in northern New England and is known here as Mountain Alder but with the latin name A. crispa (instead of A. viridis). The more common alder here is A. rugosa which has been featured in several articles in this blog about the Gale River slide site, the old Zealand Valley beaver ponds, and the avalanche track in Ammonoosuc Ravine. Alders are called "pioneers" because they are often the first to move into disturbed sites, like the old beaver ponds and slide tracks with exposed sand and gravel soils where they do quite well. 

At any rate, the author of the paper, Sultana Kamruzzahan (from Bangladesh and working on her doctoral thesis at the University of Freiburg in Germany) looked at several different populationsof  A. viridis in the Black Forest of southern Germany to determine if some of the groups are "Glacial Relicts" meaning they may have found refuge in various sites, like the Nunataks mentioned above, during the period of glaciation in Germany and that corresponds closely with the Wisconisnan glaciation including climate, etc. Her paper is titled Is Alnus Viridis a Glacial Relect in the Black Forest, and her summary, after years of difficult research, states that she found several A. viridis populations that at one time (7 million years ago) were part of a single larger group and during  glaciation became geographically isolated but continued to adapt to their immediate environment. Changes, or adaptaions, consisted mostly in changes in the function of photorecpetors. Waves of isolation of different populations of Alnus began 7 million years ago but the groups she identified  in the Black Forest began isolating 1.5 million years ago which is the time frame of the last continental glaciation and during that time and now we know at least some plant species were weathering the difficult climate and landscape. They did not become extinct and were adapting to the environment throughout their isolation.

An exciting aspect of this paper is that the author was able to detect and measure exactly in time when a plant divided into two intermediate or separate species. It would certainly be exciting to know, for instance, when the alder family left the birch family, to which its related, and became a separate genus.

This photo was taken from West Bond in 1959 while I was doing a 10-day camping-hiking trip with friends and we traversed the mountains from Randolph to North Woodstock. West Bond was a bushwhack in those days but was well worth the scrapes and hair-full of balsam needles. The summit is near the center point of the Pemigewasset Wilderness with great views all around including Mts. South Twin in the foreground and Garfield in the distance.

4-29-12 How Weird Can It Get (Spring, that is)?

 

This weird looking arrangement of daffodils was in a small garden in a doorway near Porter Square, Cambridge, MA. and the photo was taken late at night using light from a nearby street lamp. This spring, so far, has been strikingly weird. There were the two weeks of Florida-like weather in the middle of March with temps here in Northampton climbing into the 90s several days in a row, then a cold spell, followed by some warm temps again. There have been days when it's felt much more like summer than spring and now, this past week, temperatures were again sliding down below freezing.  When I was up at Lakes of the Clouds five weeks ago (3-18-12) the Mt. Washington Weather Observatory measured a record high of 40 degrees (F) for the date. Today, 4-29-12, the "Obs" measured a record low for the date of 8 degrees (F).

By the way, I've been getting angry letters from readers complaining that I'm not writing enough. They're implying that I'm slacking off, being lazy, too cavalier with my publishing responsibilities,  and neglecting the blog. I respond by ticking off a list of viable excuses for not venturing to the mountains to find fresh stories to publish: the flu, doing my taxes, a slight ankle sprain playing basketball, high gas prices, studying for yet another advanced certification exam, etc, etc. in addition to my volition to slack off and be deliciously lazy.

Red Trillium 

The impact of the weird spring has been startling in some ways. The hot temperatures lasting for several weeks in mid-March gave us the sense that spring had arrived several weeks early. There were dire prediction of loss of crops, global warming, and everything going amok generally that didn't pan out. Some plants flowered much earlier than normal. Among them garden the daffodils, spring beauties, and forsythia which are always some of the earliest to flower, or at least earlier than other flowering species. One of the more remarkable responses to the warm temperatures was that a lot of roseate species, ornamentals mostly, blossomed early but also blossomed more fully than I remember anytime in the past. It was as if each tree, and among them the cherry trees, crab apples,   etc, blossomed with intense blooms. Without green foliage and other flowering species to compete the blossoming trees produced a surreal wonderland of color that pervailed for weeks. Forsythia was in bloom, dense bright yellow blooms, for more than three weeks!

On Mt. Skinner (aka Mt. Holyoke) the beech leaves budded at almost the same day and time as last year. This is a photo taken on 4-14-12 and if you look back in the blog to last year you can see a similar terminal leaf bud on the same branch beginning to unfold. The red trillium above, too, was right on time in spite of the hot-warm weather.

Blood Root bloomed on schedule on 4-13-12.

Canada Mayflower 4-14-12 and still not in bloom. (They began to bloom on 4-20-12 right on schedule.)

These are cherry trees that bloomed right on the summit of Mt. Skinner in late March, a few weeks early, and that remained in bloom through 4-22-12 and with these brilliant tones, too.

A single cherry bloom that has weathered three weeks and still looks fresh. It could be that over the past two weeks and the cool nights with temperatures in the high 30s (near freezing) have somehow tampered with the clock regulating flowering. Generally, plants flower at the exact time each year based on light and not temperature. The length of the night, or "skotoperiod", is the deciding factor and some plants are sensitive enough to it that they can tell the difference between 2 or 3 minutes in the length of the night. We know that temperature obviously plays a part as well, but it's not considered as crucial as light.

Photo: Striped maple leaves an hour after unfolding. Translating all this to the alpine zone of Mt. Washington and the White Mountains of New Hampshire is a bit tricky. Flowers there have adapted to a much different schedule possibly based on temperature and light (as in the length of the night) due to arctic conditions that generally prevail. Success dtermined by survival would depend on the plants developing a strategy of avoiding late winter storms that are common and temperatures such as today's 8 degree (F) on the summit of Mt. Washington. One last thing about the warm temperatures and that is there has been very little moisture so far this spring in the form of precipitation so it may engender a dry spell in the near future.