By Cathleen Norman
Two Colorado girls get ready to take home their own Christmas tree. Photo by Cathleen Norman.
It’s that time of year again, and some of us must have a real Christmas tree. Some children consider it absolutely abusive if you have anything but a real Christmas tree. Some folks ventured out into the woods this year, with a $10 permit from the U.S. Forest Service that let them cut down their own tree in one of Colorado’s 10 National Forests. The three on the Front Range are more accessible and most visited – Arapaho, Pike and Roosevelt.
Our steep, mountainous state has some of the most enormous forests in the country. As you go into the woods – at Christmas or any other time of the year – take notice of our evergreens. At first, they all look alike, clothed year-round in spiky dark-green foliage and producing seed-bearing cones. But there are actually numerous “coniferous” species. Each has its favorite eco-habitat and compatible plant, bird and mammal “buddies.” Here are nine of them.
In southern Colorado, with its arid terrain and low 5,000-7,000 altitude, we find fragrant piñon and juniper shortish trees intermingling into pygmy forests. Piñons produce their prized seeds every other year, and they are home to the squawking Piñon Jay. Bighorn sheep feed on juniper with its tiny blue-green berries. For centuries, people have used the wood for campfires, fuel wood and fence posts. These shrub-sized trees live for 200–300 years or longer.
The same low, dry landscape of southern and eastern Colorado produces the western red cedar. Averaging no more than 30 feet in height, its drooping branches have small scaly leaves arrayed in flat sprays. Southwest tribes use its wood to craft cradleboards and bowls. Pioneer settlers built from it caskets and pleasantly pungent cedar chests. Still logged and milled today, western red cedar is made into roof shingles, siding, paneling, doors and patio furniture. Ranchers and farmers plant it on the Colorado plains as a sturdy windbreak.
Ponderosa pine prefers dry, sunny slopes of foothills and southern mountainsides at 5,600-9,000 elevation. Up to 120-feet tall trees with their 4 – 7 inch long needles, ponderosa forests border mountain meadows and shrubs. Pioneers built cabins and mining timbers from the oldest, first-growth ponderosa. They also used the wood for fence posts, saddle horns, snowshoes and baby cradles, and burned it to heat homes. Carpenters fashioned ponderosa wood into moldings, cabinets and crates. Year-round, the stately ponderosa is alive with birds like the Mountain Chickadee and scolding magpies. The loosely spaced forests became prime cattle grazing land. Ponderosa is susceptible to parasites – bright- dwarf mistletoe and a destructive pine beetle that has consumed whole forests in the central and northern Colorado.
Toys aplenty under this jolly tree. Photo courtesy of Denver Public Library - Western History Collection.
Douglas fir favors cool, moist slopes at 5,600–9,000 altitude – northern mountainsides and northern canyon walls. Native tribes cut its boughs for bedding, and settlers felled entire forests for railroad ties, bridge timbers, corral poles and excellent lumber. Its tapered symmetrical shape, horizontal branches and spire-like crown make the Douglas fir an ideal Christmas tree. Strong and durable, the tree grows up to 100 feet tall. Mule deer in winter browse its lower branches and seek its shelter.
Engelmann spruce grows from 9,000 feet to timberline (11,000 in much of Colorado), trees reaching heights of 120 feet. The strong uniform wood made excellent construction lumber, mine timbers, poles and railway ties. Because of its resonance, it was even used to make piano-sounding boards and violins. Fir and spruce combine into an important, snow collecting ecosystem critical to protecting our watershed.
Lodgepole pine tall, straight and strong –grows at 8,500-10,500 feet in central and northern Colorado. Its name reveals its suitability for portable Native American dwellings. Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes used 25 to 30 poles for each tipi and sometimes traveled hundreds of miles from their plains domain to harvest trees for the 20-foot-long tipi poles. Settlers used the wood for fence posts and railroad ties. Lodgepole pine is home to the pine squirrel, Uinta chipmunk and other small mammals. It is very vulnerable to the pine beetle, which has claimed a devastating number of forest acres in central and northern Colorado.
Limber pine and bristlecone grow on exposed windy sites, 7,500 elevation to timberline, often along ridge tops silhouetted against the sky. Their flat tops contrast with the shapely crowns of fir and spruce. These forests reach only 30- to 50-feet in height and grow in central Colorado, such as on the upper slopes of Mount Evans and elevated edges of South Park. Like all other conifers, these two species shelter and sustain wildlife, like the agile Clark’s nutcracker whose stout beak can break open the tough seeds from limber pine cones.
- A local, native evergreen made a glorious sight in every parlor of Victorian-era Colorado. It looks like Santa brought this little girl a baby brother. Photo by Harry Rhodes, courtesy Denver Public Library – Western History Collection.
Our U.S. Forest Service has stewarded vast stands of forest that function as both watersheds and wildlife habitats. Colorado’s settlement, growth and development brought logging, livestock grazing, town construction, game hunting and outdoor recreation each of which compromised the forest health. Permitted woodcutting and Christmas tree taking helps clear out the fuel wood that endangers forest fire. Pike National Forest anticipated issuing some 5,000 tree-cutting permits this Christmas season, according to an article, last weekend, in the Colorado Springs Gazette.
For more than a half century, the USFS has nurtured the Christmas tree tradition by contributing the annual Capitol Christmas Tree. Beginning in 1969, the Forest Service began sending to Washington, D.C., a Christmas tree harvested each year from a different state. The first was a 40-foot white pine brought from Westminster, Md.
This year, the U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree came from our neighbor the Cowboy State – a 67-foot-tall Engelmann spruce cut from the Bridger-Teton National Forest. Wyoming schoolchildren crafted 5,000 ornaments to trim the tree, and the giant decorated spruce toured the state in a semi-truck so that festive citizens could view it on its way to Washington, D.C. As tradition called for, the tree was lit up on Dec. 7 by Wyoming sixth-grader David Sitter with the help of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House.
National Forests in Colorado have twice provided the Capitol Christmas Tree: a 65-foot-tall Colorado blue spruce from the Pike National Forest in 2000 and a 65-foot-tall Engelmann spruce from Routt National Forest in 1990.
