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.
|
|