#whitebark pine

Whitebark Pine (Pinus albicaulis) - Mary Vaux Walcott , 1931 .

American , 1860-1940

Krummholz describes how trees can be twisted and made crooked by wind and winter weather. Found most often at the highest places that trees can grow, called tree line, krummholz trees are the trees sculpted and pruned, sometimes into amazing shapes. Whitebark pines are very good at krummholz. They can go with the flow of the winds and winter storms found in the high elevations of the subalpine environment. They are most easily viewed at Sunrise, our park’s highest summer road.

Whitebark pines are not tall trees. Without wind sculpting, they tend to be about 16-66 feet tall. They are wonderfully long lived trees ranging from 500 to 1,000 years old. Because they live in areas with not so wonderful soil (kind of rocky), with long winters, lots of snow and wind, whitebark pines are also slow growing trees. But as small and twisted as they may be, whitebark pines have big roles in the subalpine environment. They help stabilize soils, regulate run-off and snowmelt, and provide an important food source to subalpine animals with their seeds.

Currently listed by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a Threatened species, the whitebark pine is under threat from non-native white pine blister rust, native mountain pine beetles, impacts from altered fire regimes, climate change, and combinations of all four of these. Scientists have been working on these problems, especially the blister rust, for a while now. Programs are under way to find a way to save these amazing trees even as their numbers decrease across their range and in the park.

Where is your favorite place to see whitebark pines? Have you hiked trails or gone to scenic viewpoints and found some fantastic krummholz shapes in the pines? ~ams

More information on trees in the conifer family in the national park can be found here https://www.nps.gov/mora/learn/nature/conifer-trees.htm . Research done by the North Coast & Cascades Inventory & Monitoring Network can be found here https://www.nps.gov/im/nccn/monitoring-reports.htm .

NPS Photos. Top: Rangers climb whitebark pine trees. Bottom: Whitebark pine trees at Mount Rainier National Park.

Why are people climbing those trees? In the Sunrise, Hidden Lake, and Summerland areas of the park you may see park employees climbing whitebark pine trees to cover cones with rectangular wire cages (or using tongs on 30 foot poles to place the cages). Whitebark pine is a proposed threatened tree species under the Endangered Species Act that has experienced over 60% mortality at Mount Rainier National Park due to an introduced fungus, white pine blister rust. Whitebark pine is a high elevation species important to subalpine and alpine communities. Their seeds are a food source for wildlife, especially the Clark's nutcracker, a bird that breaks open the hard pine cones and caches the seeds away for future snacking. Whitebark pine is a masting species, meaning most individual trees produce their cones only every few years and all at once. This is a masting year at Mount Rainier and throughout the northwest. It takes two years for the cones to develop, so the seeds and cones developing this year were actually fertilized last year and overwintered on the trees.

NPS Photos. Right: Whitebark pine cone cracked open by a Clark's nutcracker. Left: A whitebark pine branch infected by white pine blister rust.

The park, in partnership with the US Forest Service’s Forest Health Protection Division, will collect seeds from Mount Rainier trees for restoration and screening for fungal resistance. However, the developing cones must be caged to stop nutcrackers from breaking them all open and eating the seeds. Lots of cones will be left for nutcrackers and squirrels and the cages don't harm the trees. Some of the seeds will be sent away to a US Forest Service lab so that they can be screened for genetic resistance to the white pine blister rust, important knowledge for conservation and planning for future restoration. Other cones, like those collected at Sunrise, will be used for restoration because many of the largest cone bearing trees there are already known to be very resistant to rust and are good source trees for seeds.

Walking around Sunrise in the summer and fall, you might think this is a pretty marvelous place to live.

But if you and I slogged through the snow to get back here in the winter, would you find it so fabulous?

Some living organisms do.

Some plants and animals have found this and many high and dry places throughout the North American West to be great places to live. Despite soaring elevations, say around 5,000 feet above sea level or higher. Despite long, snowy winters. Even with strong, dry winds some plants and animals have found ways to survive in places like Sunrise.

One key to this marvelous ability; it pays to have friends.

Say you’re a tree like the whitebark pine, Pinus albicaulis. You adore living in sunny, drier places and are a natural at dealing with high elevations. So places like Sunrise appeal to you. You’ll even grow up into the alpine environment which is almost defined by having no trees. I’m not saying it’s a glamorous life up there because you do get quite twisted and forced to hug the earth (also known as a krumholtz). But you manage to thrive in all but one thing. You don’t do well with seed dispersal. Big, heavy, wing-less seeds don’t travel far especially when the pinecones don’t open on their own.

Then a friend steps up to help you out.

A few animals have learned about the seeds of whitebark pines but your biggest friend is a Clark’s nutcracker, Nucifraga columbiana. These gray and black members of the corvid family are brilliant at getting the whitebark pine seeds out of the cone. Not only will the Clark’s nutcracker eat the seeds, they also plant them, albeit accidentally. They harvest the seeds and then store them in the ground in places that don’t get too much snow. One bird will store thousands, sometimes 30,000-90,000 seeds in a year. (It pays to have birdy-GPS to remember so many storage locations.) Of course not all of these will be eaten by next summer so some seeds get the chance to germinate and grow.

The bird gets food and the tree gets it’s seed planted. It really pays to have friends. ~ams

P.S. Please remember that in Mount Rainier National Park, pinecone seeds need to be left for the wildlife and not harvested for human consumption. The animals thank you.

The industrious Clark’s Nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana) collects far more pine seeds than it can eat, and likes to bury excess seeds to save for later. The birds are so good at essentially “planting” seeds that whitebark pines have come to depend on Clark’s Nutcrackers to propagate. Likewise, Clark’s Nutcrackers prefer whitebark pine as their primary food source. Unfortunately, a decline in whitebark pine due to blister rust (a fungal disease) has also led to a decline in Clark’s Nutcracker populations.