The ghostly conifers found on chilly, wind-swept peaks like this may well be among the earliest victims of a warming climate. Even in the Northwest, rising temperatures at higher elevations have brought hundreds of thousands of whitebark pines in contact with a deadly predator — the mountain pine beetle - that is helping drive this odd tree toward extinction.
Connie Mehmel, with the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, is one of a handful of entomologists struggling to track the beetles' destructive path.
Mountain pine beetles are probably best-known here as the trunk-girdling devils that have reddened and deadened millions of acres of lodgepole, exposing the Northwest to a greater potential for cataclysmic wildfires. But the evolutionary history of lodgepole pine and beetles is so intertwined that those forests in many places are expected to grow back.
Whitebark pines may not.
"What concerns me and a lot of people in my line of work is we are seeing beetles being more active in areas where we didn't use to see them - particularly in higher-elevation areas," Mehmel says. "We have thousands of acres of whitebark pine that are being attacked by mountain pine beetles, more than we've seen in quite a long time." Read the full report here.
Source: by Craig Welch, Seattle Times, Environment Reporter, Sawtooth Ridge, Okanogan County.
