Picture(s) of the Day (PotD)

This is a picture of Skeeter hugging a tree. We've seen a lot of trees here in Southeast Alaska, and quite a few of them are this big around (if not bigger.) This picture was taken while we we hiking the Herring Cove trail in Sitka. The woods here amaze me. There are so many plants crammed into one space- there are plants growing over, under, and on each other. And their growth and life cycles are intricately intertwined.  This is the rain forest. The Tongass National Forest to be exact.
This forest is the largest National Forest in the US and it covers nearly ALL of Southeast Alaska (about 17 million acres- this is a chance for me to practice my natural history facts for tourists.) This forest is classified as a rainforest, because of the amount of yearly rainfall it receives and the fact that there are never forest fires here. It's big and wet. AND it's unique. And I'll tell you why. According to a local naturalist, it's all about location.
Southeast Alaska is part of the marine west coast climate that occurs in Pacific Northwest. Southeast receives lots of rainfall and experiences mild winters and cool summers. There is a lot of moisture building up in the Pacific that gets dumped here. But go inland a little further and the temperatures drop 10+ degrees and it's dry. Why? Mountains. There are mountains very close to the coast. Why? Because Southeast is located at the meeting point for the Pacific and Northwest plates. Therefore, there are mountains being built up as I type (and as you read.) There is also volcanic activity going on here. In fact, there is a volcano here in Sitka: Mt. Edgecombe.

The volcano is on the left. To the right is a huge crater. I'm told there is a lake in the middle. Mt. Edgecombe is located on Kruzof Island in Sitka Sound. It takes several hours to kayak there. The adventurous types like to paddle out there, rent a small Forest Service cabin, and hike the volcano. This sounds like fun, and it gets better. Kruzof has a dense population of brown bears, even more dense than Baranof Island (where Sitka is located.) Anyway, enough of this bear distraction business. Back to the geology lesson.
Climate, plate tectonics...what about glaciers? The forest here is much older than anything you'd see in your town, yet it's relatively young, less than 400 years old. Why? Because the area is still recovering from the ice age.
Snow and ice covered this place for thousands of years. Glaciers formed after layer upon layer upon thousands of layers of snow became compacted. The pressure from all this snow/ice is so great, that the ice on the bottom on glacier becomes an a new form of water: a malleable form of ice. Voila! A glacier! A river of ice-stuff. Glaciers carved away at the landscape underneath. When the ice fields melted and glaciers disappeared, they left a barren eroded earth. But nature is amazing. Bacteria and molds migrate here. Lichens and mosses grow. Birds poop on it. Seeds in the poop grow (a seed and fertilizer in one!) Small mammals migrate to feed on the plants. Bigger mammals follow these guys and eat them. And 200 years later, you have a forest. In the case of Southeast Alaska, it's a Spruce-Hemlock forest (with the occasional alder and cedar tree.)
When you walk into the woods here, you feel like you've entered some fairy tale forest. You're surrounded by huge tree trunks, mossy forest floors, wild berry bushes, curtains of "old man's beard" and "witch's hair" lichens... Moss grows up the trunks and roots of live trees. And then small plants sprout up in the moss. Hey little guy, that's not the ground. That's a stinkin' tree you're growing on!
It's a feeding frenzy in there. A combination of nutritious soil and lots of rain lead to a steady, rapid growth of plants. If you look at tree rings in one of these trees, you'll find that all the rings are roughly the same width. You can't slow these guys down. And check out these roots:

I'm not entirely sure what happened here, but I think its a tree growing on top of a stump. The tree started out by feeding on the stump, until it's roots were long enough to reach the ground. I mean, those roots look like octopus arms engulfing a massive stump. Is that what you get from this picture? I wonder how long it took the roots to reach the ground? 

Anyway, like I said, it's a growing/feeding frenzy in there. I bet if you laid down in the woods and took an hour nap, you'd wake you to find tree roots creeping over your body. Yikes!

So there you go. PotD and natural history lesson in one. Peace!