Dense Aspen Grove, Autumn. Sierra Nevada, California. October 3, 2009. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Small trees grow closely together in a dens aspen grove near South Lake, Sierra Nevada, Callifornia.
I have photographed this dense stand of Sierra Nevada aspens below South Lake in the past. I first found it a year ago while exploring a short gravel road off to the side of the main road to South Lake, and I’ve come to like photographing it in late afternoon, evening, or cloudy light – all of which diffuse and soften the light, allowing more visibility into the center of the very dense trees.
This year the leaf color was not nearly as intense in this grove as it was when I visited last year, though here I think the complexity of the branch patterns shows up better. (Though that will be almost impossible to see in this small jpg version – I’ve tested for a print at 10″ x 30″ size where the detail is more clearly seen.)
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Like J. Muir said, everything is hitched up to every other thing.
In the interests of full disclosure, I am a liberal and progressive. And so I was listening to the Green 960 AM radio station today and heard a report about aspen trees dying off all over the west and that scientists are still baffled by this. So I went to google and did a search for dying aspen trees. The first hits were from 2006 but on a few links down was a link for this recent Oct 15, 2009 report from the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125547187504583409.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLTopStories
The article discusses any number of things that could be going on and causing this decline in areas like Colorado and Arizona and I have to wonder if this is what is going on in the Bishop Creek area too where I saw apparently dead aspens and wilted looking aspens.
The other thing that I note from the article is how one little thing, say the killing of wolves, can affect the regeneration of aspens, or complete lack of it. People like to think that they can do this seemingly little thing or that and that it should be completely OK and won’t affect anything else. While I don’t immediately know why the wolf population is down in Arizona, there has certainly been an attitude of let’s kill all the wolves as they are pests, or who cares about the little smelt fish in the delta, or you name it. Upsetting the balance of nature is a bad idea, especially when you haven’t bothered to consider the resulting impact.
I just hope they can figure out what is going on with the aspen trees because even without a camera in hand, I love them. Not that they will, but I would hate to see them become extinct.