Climate Change Up Close

One of the disadvantages of being rooted in one place for several decades is that I can see often dramatic changes in the landscape, and not necessarily good ones. On the Cub Lake trail in Rocky Mountain National Park I’m increasingly getting the sense that I’m watching climate change in action.

When I first discovered the trail some 30 years ago, I was thrilled to find small ponds along the trail that wound through the valley up to the lake. I would sit on a rock along the shore and watch the ducks and salamanders, the green sedges bowing in the wind. Along the trail were small groves of aspen that got thicker and taller as you climbed. Starting in late spring, the valley was a sea of grasses that turned bronze every fall.

But 30 years later, the landscape has changed drastically. Most of the ponds have dried up or shrunk, hastened by  a warmer, drier climate. A fire five years ago charred most of the aspens, leaving behind black skeletal trunks.

Last year’s dry winter caused its own kind of stress, and many pine trees are dead or dying, their needles gone or turned orange. Willow bushes suffered a double whammy: the bushes that didn’t dry up and die in the winter had their branches broken by the late May snowstorm. We’ve had dry winters and May snowstorms before but never this dry nor this much snow—three feet in some places.

Cub Lake itself is quickly becoming a marsh (right). Every year, the water lilies form a tighter circle around the lake, so today the open water is getting smaller and smaller, a small blue pupil in an eye of plants.  About a decade ago, I sat on one side of the lake and watched, in some apprehension, as a moose swam across the lake directly toward me. Today, the moose would have to walk across.

Across the lake is a hillside of dead brown pine trees, a result of the same fire, which happened in October, an unusual time for a fire because in most years it’s too cold then for a fire to roar down the mountainside like this one did. But 2012 was the warmest year on record in the  United States and the warmest November in 100 years.

That area of the park had not seen a fire for 800 years, and a lot of trees were already dead or stressed from the pine beetle, which has devastated so much of Colorado’s forests; our winters don't get cold enough anymore to kill the insect. It was a fire waiting to happen, even in October, and the fire was so hot that some firefighters reported it was burning underneath the snow. It wasn’t completely extinguished until December.

This slow devastation of the landscape breaks my heart. And yet, I wonder if it's a case of knowing too much. On the trail this summer, I stopped to talk to a couple who were visiting from Kansas. They didn’t see the all the losses I did. They only saw the beauty of these mountains and were just happy to be here. And so, I look for what’s here—the green grasses and columbine growing among the charred trees, and the young aspen shoots pushing up into a new and quickly changing world.

Comments

[Brent]

This was one of my favorite hiking destinations when living in Colorado, 10-15 years ago. It looks like a lot has changes since then.

[Jennifer Woodhull]

Ouch. Yet going back to your previous post, I can't help wondering whether we have climate change to thank for the unusually rich display of wildflowers … I guess the Kansas couple have it right: or as a teacher of mine once said, "Cultivate what uplifts; abandon what degrades. There is no other recipe."

[Kathy Kaiser]

Wonderful quote, Jennifer, thanks.