Great hikes to see the great trees

By Reese Halter, Calgary HeraldJune 28, 2009

The best thing about summer is going outdoors. The West Coast is a magical place for hiking with family or friends and it's exceptional camping country, too.

In 1986, Wayne Topolewski, a forestry classmate at UBC, and I visited the west side of Vancouver Island, about 20 kilometres northwest of Port Renfrew, in search of massive Sitka spruce.

We hiked into the Carmanah Valley, an extremely lush rainforest which receives almost four metres of rainfall each year, and marvelled at what we found--the biggest trees we'd ever seen. We measured some and they were equivalent to 30-storey skyscrapers. It turns out that the canopies of the Sitka spruce, western hemlock, amabilis fir and western red cedar were loaded with undiscovered plant and animal life. Some treetops had as many as 1,000 strains of a single species of fungus, while others were endowed with lichens (half algae and half fungus). These treetops are home to an astonishing array of life weighing easily in excess of 500 kilograms per hectare.

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Great hikes to see the great trees

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Desert icon Joshua trees are vanishing, scientists say

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11:36 PM PDT on Saturday, June 20, 2009
By JANET ZIMMERMANThe Press-Enterprise

Kurt Miller / The Press-Enterprise
Mike Cipra, a desert program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, examines a burned Joshua tree that shows signs of growth earlier this month. Scientists say the effects of global warming could make Joshuas extinct within a century.

A breeze stirs the silence at Joshua Tree National Park as a red-tailed hawk takes flight from the spiky arm of one of the namesake plants in search of breakfast.

It's a scene that national parks protector Mike Cipra has witnessed many times. Still, he can't contain his enthusiasm on this early morning outing, despite the gloomy topic he's discussing with a visitor -- the probable extinction of the Joshua tree in the park that bears its name.

The ancient plants are dying in the park, the southern-most boundary of their limited growing region, scientists say. Already finicky reproducers, Joshua trees are the victim of global warming and its symptoms -- including fire and drought -- plus pollution and the proliferation of non-native plants. Experts expect the Joshuas to vanish entirely from the southern half of the state within a century

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