It’s unusual to see a group of skiers parked on the side of a run, especially when there’s fresh powder. But as the fat flakes were falling on one of this winter’s rare snowy days, fifteen skiers stopped amidst the trees of Whitefish Mountain Resort. They looked up at an oddly shaped one.
“You just see how, how limby it is, and how those lower limbs are trying to reach to the top. It just has this weird shape, really common with whitebark”, said Mike Giese, a retired forester.
He used his ski pole to point out an open wound, called a canker, on the whitebark pine.
“Oh yeah, there's some pitch coming out of the stem, some bleeding. It's coming from that main canker that girdled the top of that tree”, Giese said.
Cankers are caused by blister rust. It’s an introduced fungus that has decimated whitebark populations. Giese identified bite marks along the edge of this canker - likely left by squirrels.
“There's something they like in there, something salty or sweet or something, and so you'll see this swelled spot, and it's totally denuded of bark. You can see the little gnaw mark,” Giese said.
In some regions, like northwest Montana, over 90 percent of whitebark pines have died, which led to the tree being listed as an endangered species three years ago.
Whitebarks are a keystone species, meaning they support a diverse ecosystem. Their shadows help snowpack last longer and their calorie-rich seeds are an important food source for everything from grizzly bears, to Clark’s nutcrackers. The gray and white bird relies on the seeds, and whitebarks rely on the birds to disperse them.
"Oftentimes you'll see whitebark pine coming out of the ground in clusters of 2,3,4,5, sometimes, very, very common. Here we have two. And the reason for that is because Clark's nutcracker is burying those seeds, Giese said.
Giese is a volunteer with the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation – a Missoula-based nonprofit working to conserve the imperiled species. Whitebarks only grow above six-thousand feet, so their habitat overlaps often with ski areas.
Whitefish Mountain is a certified Whitebark Pine Friendly Ski Area. It was the first resort in the country to receive this certification a decade ago.
It has signage about whitebarks and offers talks and tours, like what Giese’s doing. He took a question from the group’s youngest skiers.
“How tall does the trees get," he asked.
“That's a great question. The tallest one I've seen, it was up in Eureka, straight as an arrow. I think that tree was probably pushing 80 feet”, Giese replied.
Some whitebarks are capable of resisting blister rust. These “plus” trees or “elite” trees, as they are often called, are helping restore the population. The U.S. Forest Service collects their seeds and starts them in a greenhouse to eventually be replanted.
Giese said the main goal here is to spread awareness, as many people often ski through these trees without ever realizing what they’re surrounded by. As the tour ended, the skiers, now able to identify whitebarks, pointed downhill to let it rip.
