Cone Crop of the Century

If you've been hiking in the Rockies this summer, you've probably noticed something: the evergreens are loaded with cones.  The subalpine fir and the Engelmann spruce in the higher parts of Banff and Yoho parks are covered with cones, and in our twenty plus years here, this is only the second time we've seen this.

Bumper crop of subalpine fir cones ripening in mid-August

It's called “masting”, and has been observed in other tree species around the world. Biologists think that when big mast years, like this one, are paired up against years of almost no cone production, then predators of cones – like squirrels – can never reach a consistent population level where they can eat all the seeds in all the cones.

It's the trees' defence system: starve the squirrels one year, and overwhelm them with food the next.  It guarantees that some of the seeds in the cones will get to the ground to germinate, which is what the trees want.

Fir cones shedding their seeds last week.

The big question is, “how do the trees do it?”  How do they synchronize, between individuals and across species, the big mast years and the years of low cone production?  We haven't been able to find the answer, but if anybody out there knows, we'd love to hear about it.

In the meantime, you can enjoy the crop through photography, and you can watch the red squirrels in their collecting frenzy.  In the last couple of weeks, we've been beaned in the head by cones that the squirrels are throwing down to the ground to collect for winter.

Cones clipped by squirrels for winter storage.

The Summer of Fire, Ten Years After

Now that summer is on the wane, and the Numa Fire burning in Kootenay National Park is settling down, we can turn our attention to the summer of 2003, ten years ago, when it felt like much of western Canada was ablaze.

On July 31 that year, a large lightning storm in Kootenay (just south of Lake Louise) started several fires.  Two of them eventually grew into one enormous fire which burned over 17,000 hectares of the park.  It didn't rain for 42 straight days, so every morning we'd wake up to blue skies, but not to the south: behind Mount Temple, the signature peak in the village of Lake Louise, it would look like a nuclear bomb was going off, as smoke from the fires rose to 20,000 feet.

By mid-September, rains and some bold back-burning finally put out the blaze, but since then, life has returned.  We've been watching and photographing the changes in Kootenay, so here's a ten year anniversary montage in images...

August, 2003.  At the height of the 2003 Kootenay wildfires, firefighters take a break after working to save historic Kootenay Park Lodge from the flames.  Photo by park warden John Niddrie.

July 2005. Two years after the fire, the forest floor near Stanley Glacier is covered in arnica flowers.

August, 2007.  Four years after the fire, the Stanley Glacier trail erupts in fireweed.

August, 2013.  Ten years after the fire, young lodgepole pine are now taller than a person near Marble Canyon.

August, 2013.  Burnt trees and pink wildflowers stand in beautiful contrast on the trail through Prospector's Valley.