Pando - carried on the Winds of Change

 

one of the first warm spring days in thousands of years after the last ice age, a single Aspen seed floating 9,000

feet in the sky came to rest on the southeastern edge of the Fishlake Basin. A land littered with massive volcanic boulders, split apart along an active fault line, carved by glaciers, littered with mineral rich glacial till and shaped by landslides and torrential snow melts that continue to this day.

 

Into a Wilderness Ripe with Possibilities

 

What would appear to be a wasteland to

the untrained eye, made for a perfect home

for the Pando seed. A location along the steep

side of a spreading fault zone that provides

water drainage to the lake below and a

barren landscape with rich soil laid down

by glaciers. A place where the light hungry

Pando seed would have faced no competition

for sunlight. Underground, a tumultuous geologic

landscape favors Pando’s sideways-moving root

system giving it advantage over other native trees,

which prefer to dig down.

 

A Tree with Roots that could span

halfway around the World

Able to grow up to 3 feet per year, if we saw

the first branch of Pando, we would have thought

nothing of it. Those first years, any number of

disasters could have destroyed the tree

altogether. In fact, for Pando to exists at all,

means at least one disaster, set the tree on

a new course that created the tree have 

today. As a male tree, Pando only produces

pollen so, to advance itself over the land,

Pando replicates itself by sending up 

new stems from its root,

a process called suckering.

Some time in those first 150 years of Pando’s life,

something disrupted the growth hormones

underground and hormones in the trunk,

creating an imbalance and Pando began

to sucker.

Although there’s no way to tell what that

force was, we do know that was the moment

Pando started to self-propagate, spread

across the land, and toward us in time.

Today,  that one tree has become a

lattice-work of roots and stems that a

rapid field estimate by Dr. Paul Rogers

suggests, could stretch 12,000 miles

or, halfway around the world.

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©Theophanu Christiane Klappert

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