Oh, I Forgot About The Hills

So after three weeks of not seeing a decent stand of trees, we made it to the Black Hills of South Dakota. It was amazing how much we both missed the something as simple as a forest. Remember how I said it was so easy to forget what it was like to camp after being sedentary in Avon for two weeks? Well, it happened that quick with landscape too. And hills…well, I’m almost embarrassed at how long it’s been since I saw something that was higher than just a “rolling hill.” For that it’s easily been almost two months. But it was well worth the wait for the ponderosa pines and bur oaks. And the buffalo and mule deer. The big horned sheep, rattlesnakes and prairie falcons. Oh yes, it was well worth the wait. And the Ultrastar made it seamlessly through the windy, steep roads of route 16A. And through the tunnels with a height of twelve feet four inches. By the way, our thanks again to Dennis and Dix at Jurren’s Repair. We definitely couldn’t have climbed the hills to get here without them.
Yep, so the first day we were at Custer State Park was saw seven big horned sheep, four mule deer and lots of buffalo (of course). There was even one that came through the campground right before dusk and had no problem laying down and taking a load off at the bottom of the hill from our camp. We got some cool video footage but, sorry, no good pictures.
We decided that we couldn’t settle for just getting teased by trails that actually had hills to climb with a two night stay so we extended our visit for a third night to take advantage of the beautiful terrain. Friday morning we woke up to a bright shining sun, drank some coffee, ate breakfast and hit a seldom use utility road for a great six mile hike. We didn’t see a whole lot in the form of large wildlife (two dogs don’t exactly attract that type of thing) but we did see four nice sized buck, though I’m sure we didn’t see even a fraction of the animals that saw us. We ended the day as awesome as it started…with a fire roasted homemade pizza (and a small stromboli for the freezer) along with a side of greens topped with gorgonzola, red onion and raisins.


Yeah, we’re roughing it out here on the road. Roughing it smoothly I’d say!

These Black Hills sure are beautiful though. Craggy rock outcrops (rockin’out with your crop out) jutting out between magnificent stands of ponderosa pine. I know these pictures aren’t the best for showing off the beauty of it, but they will have to do.





There is quite a bit of brown needle evidence of mountain pine beetle infestations in bunches on the hillsides though. How the beetle works is the larvae burrow into the tree and feed underneath the bark in the spring, hindering nutrient flow throughout the tree. By late summer the beetle has depleted the tree of nutrients, the needles turning from green to red to brown and eventually killing the tree. While driving through the Black Hills we saw much evidence of entire hillsides that were completely wiped out due to infestations.



The management solution in Custer State Park is to keep the stands at a low to medium densities, hence creating stronger trees that may be able to defend themselves against the beetle attacks (due to the human influence of fire suppression tree stands have a tendency to grow in high densities causing beetle outbreaks to proliferate). Although the mountain pine beetle is a native species to the forests of western North America, it has provided its share of damage to these forests. In years past infestations were seen as a part of the forest’s system of self-management, a way of thinning out the weak, unhealthy pines to make way for the larger, more dominant pines within the forest. But the beetle has since then reached epidemic proportions for pines forests all over western North America, climbing north and into higher elevations. A primary concern, though, is not so much the impact they have had on ponderosa pine, as devastating as it has been, but the impact they are having on lodgepole pines. This pine species is a keystone species in these forest ecosystems, coevolving with Clark’s nutcracker in a mutualistic relationship (although keystone species should refer to a predator, it is sometimes referred to a non-predator species that appears to be critical to the processes within an ecosystem). You see, these pines cones do not open on their own accord. They either require high heat fires to spread their seeds or those trusty nutcrackers to use their long pointed beaks, seemingly adapted for this sole purpose, to break apart the cone to pull out the seeds and carry them to caching sites that, incidentally, favor whitebark pine establishment and growth. On a side note, these pines cones are also a primary energy source for grizzly bears for successful overwintering. The lack of this major source of fat (in pine nuts) could be problematic in that the grizzlies will try to substitute more meat in their diet to build up for the winter months, possibly creating harmful encounters with humans. So this isn’t just a simple story of the process of how one species impacts another but how a cascading effect could potentially destroy primary habitat and nutrient intake for crucial animals within the system.

Okay, the ecology lesson is over…for now.