An article in SF Gate discussed a decline in the number of aspen trees: “Climate Change Cited in Die-off of Aspens”
According to the report, there are a number of factors affecting the trees: fire prevention policies that stop the natural burn cycle, insect infestations, and climate change. The reports speaks mostly about trees outside of California, but those one wonders if these factors affect the trees here as well.
Robin, thanks for the info on LV canyon and Yosemite Valley. The strange season continues! The aspen color turned on schedule up high but quite late down low, and it seems that sheltered and low places like LV canyon are just now where they might typically be a week or more earlier.
And now Yosemite Valley colors seem to be arriving a bit earlier than expected. My feeling in the past has been that the YV colors are best right about the very end of October (perhaps the last full week?) through maybe the first few days of November. But here we are with many reports of good color almost a week early.
Odd. But I’m going to try to get to the Valley at least briefly this weekend!
Dan
I think it almost certainly has to affect our trees, too–and the weird aspen season we’ve had this year has made me wonder if that’s part of the reason why.
I finally (!) got a little fall color yesterday. We spent the weekend at Yosemite, which had more color than I expected for this time of year, and should be positively glorious in another week or two, and then stopped in Lee Vining Canyon on the way out of the park yesterday morning. I’d say the canyon is a tiny bit past peak, but utterly brilliantly yellow-orange right now. The one bad thing was the number of big aspen limbs that had been blown down (presumably from last week’s storm)–there were so many across the creek (and they were too big to move) that I couldn’t really get any shots of the creek with aspens. June Lake Loop looked gorgeous, too, but I didn’t have time to stop and get any pics there.