Landmark limber pine stood watch over Snake River for centuries

Via Wyoming News Exchange

JACKSON - It watched as the Doane Expedition slogged and foundered along the icy river, a winter odyssey destined to fail.

It watched as the off-duty Army soldier or surveyor who discovered the three bodies at Deadman's Bar hurriedly paddled his canoe to reach a human outpost and report the gruesome find.

It watched as John Colter, a private who left Lewis and Clark to join trappers and strike out on his own, came rambling through the valley in search of a fortune in furs.

It was a majestic limber pine tree that grew slowly on a rocky terrace above the Snake River in what is today Grand Teton National Park. It was a mere sapling when the first European colonists arrived on the continent.

And on Aug. 30, it fell - undone by the natural meandering of the river and the wind it had withstood for centuries.

"From a historical point of view, the tree witnessed a lot of history," said boatman Wayne Johnson, who floated past it for 57 years.

The elder tree was located just upstream of the Bar BC Ranch, at nearly exactly the halfway point of the 10-mile float trip between Deadman's Bar and Moose, where most park outfitters float the Snake. It stood about 35 feet tall with a rounded crown, not as gnarled as many old limber pines can be. In recent years it had become a favorite perch for a pair of adult bald eagles with a nest nearby.

"It was totally a landmark tree," said Colby Colonel, owner and guide for Solitude Float Trips. "The eagles seemed to love that thing. You could always count on it."

Neil Huckin was counting on it when he rounded the bend upstream on the afternoon of Aug. 30. A second-generation boatman for Barker-Ewing Scenic Trips, Huckin had floated past the limber pine in the morning with a load of passengers. But by afternoon, high winds were ravaging the river corridor, with gusts of more than 30 mph. On his second trip, Huckin paused for a moment.

"Something was missing," he said. He had become accustomed to searching for eagles, which sometimes sat side by side on a thick lateral branch of the pine and could be seen from a long distance upriver.

Instead he found the evergreen lying sideways on the river cobbles, with branches and roots snapped off, about 15 feet below the edge of the bank where it used to stand. This was an eventuality most guides knew would come: The Snake shifted substantially to the west in 2017 and heavily eroded the bank, leaving only a few roots holding the limber pine in place. Still, it stung.

"I was really bummed, really depressed about it," Huckin said. "It's kind of funny what you get attached to when you float past it every day for 20 years or so."

Colonel received a text from one of his Solitude guides, Jay Evans, with a photo of the tree down: "Noooo!" he said.

Mike Merigliano is a plant ecologist with a strong background in hydrology and fluvial geomorphology. He has done a lot of work on how changes in streams affect the distribution of riparian vegetation. Only a week or so before the limber pine fell, he had floated past it with other scientists and park staff as part of a Wild and Scenic River plant survey.

Last month Merigliano and Simeon Caskey, physical science branch chief for Grand Teton park, hiked about a mile from the Bar BC Ranch and scrambled down the steep slope to investigate the downed conifer on the riverbank. Merigliano used a quarter-inch bore to take core samples from the tree to estimate its age. By looking at the size and shape of what remained of the pine, he guessed it to be 150 to 200 years old.

While twisting the bore into the tree trunk, Merigliano found rotten wood in places, possibly owing to the erosion that left so few roots attached to soil in recent years. The cores he extracted resembled tiny dowels, and he placed them in a straw for protection. He used a tape to measure the circumference of the trunk: 5.2 feet.

At home Merigliano glued the best core samples to a board, then sanded them flat and smooth with 1,000-grit paper. He used a 10x magnifying glass to count the rings. Each ring shows the growth of the tree in a year. To account for the rotten patches, he calculated the average number of rings per inch and extrapolated that number for the full radius of the trunk.

What he found surprised him: The tree was much older than he thought. The best core, 3.5 inches in length, had 150 rings, and the density of rings per inch suggested a rough estimate of 424 years old.

That's assuming the tree grew at the same rate in its first 274 years as it did in its last 150 years, Merigliano said. More likely, he said, the tree grew faster when younger. "It's safe to say it's 300 to 350 years old or so," he said.

Informed of Merigliano's findings, river guides were impressed.

"That's amazing," said Johnson of Grand Teton Lodge Co.

"Wow, that is so cool," said Solitude's Colonel.

"That makes me even more bummed," said Barker-Ewing's Huckin. "Dammit!"

Originally, a Clark's nutcracker may have cached the limber pine seed on the river terrace. Even at the low end of Merigliano's projection, it germinated eight decades before Lewis and Clark set out and named such birds.

The tree was at least 80 to 130 years old when Colter is said to have been the first white person to lay eyes on the Tetons. It was 150 to 230 years old by the time of the Doane expedition (1876) and Deadman's Bar murders (1886), prominent events in the history of the upper Snake.

With the tree's falling, there are few visible limber pines left along the Snake in Teton park. Johnson has a favorite just upstream of Deadman's Bar, also on the west bank, and there used to be a few near the 4 Lazy F Ranch above Moose. But the Labor Day snowstorm of September 2020, with high winds out of the north, may have taken out the last of those.

Johnson, 77, said he expects such things to happen, as it's a natural process. However, "You hate to lose any of those old trees," he said.

This story was published on November 15, 2023.