Years Take Their Toll On Forest Giant Palouse Skyline Will Lose Its Ancient Paragon

The biggest western white pine in Idaho is dying.

For probably 400 years, it lived next to a small watercourse below a ridge with others of its kind.

In the last quarter of its life, the tree favored genetically and by location rose to dominate the skyline. At the same time, the land it stood on became Idaho, the watercourse became Mannering Creek.

Logging, then blister rust and natural forest succession took most of the other pines. A highway was built nearby through a six-mile stand of the remaining trees. It became The White Pine Drive. A grove the giant tree stood in became the Giant White Pine Campground. In 1981, the University of Idaho certified the 214-foot tall tree - 21 feet, 5 inches in circumference - as the biggest pinus monticola in the state.

This year, western pine beetles invaded the old tree.

“A healthy tree would have repelled them. This one wasn’t able to,” says Lonnie Way, a forestry technician with the Palouse Ranger District of the Clearwater National Forest.

The Palouse District has three of Idaho’s biggest trees. The biggest black hawthorn grows a few miles from the pine. The biggest western red cedar is in the upper basin of Elk Creek on the district’s eastern edge.

“To me, it’s kind of a bragging point. There are some management implications to having those trees, but they’re nice to have. They show this country can grow some big trees,” says Kent Wellner, Palouse District resource forester.

He’d like to see the giant white pine logged with a high stump so a platform and interpretive display can be built around it.

The tree contains an estimated 13,009 board feet of wood. Converted to pulp, it might take that and more to produce enough paper to carry off Wellner’s plan. The U.S. Forest Service, in general, requires a mountain of paperwork to support its decisions. The Palouse District in particular - located near university towns such as Moscow and Pullman and logging communities such as Potlatch, Deary and Bovill - gets sharp scrutiny from forest users. Indeed, on a sign in front of the Giant White Pine, someone with a black marker has printed the tart obserdvation: “This tree is dying, too bad they cut all the rest.”

Wellner figures it will take at least two years to decide the tree’s fate. Because it’s leaning toward a parking lot, it will be removed eventually, rather than left intact after it dies.

The tree produced six pine cones this year. Way, with spotting scope and rifle, harvested four of them. A climber scaled a neighboring hemlock and, with a long pole, knocked down the other two. The cones will produce about 600 seeds, according to Mary Mahalovich, Forest Service regional selective breeding specialist. Some will be saved; the others have been assigned lot number 5050.

They will be germinated and exposed to various blister rust spores. If, at the end of five years, their survival indicates they have superior rust resistance, the seedlings will be transferred to a nursery in the Panhandle National Forest and grown to maturity. The resulting grandchildren of the Giant White Pine will be planted in forests throughout North Idaho.

Mahalovich is confident the seedlings will make the cut. The Giant White Pine’s long life indicates it had genetic defenses against blister rust. It is also likely, she says, the tree will pass on its tall, straight trunk, free of defects, to succeeding generations.

“It’s kind of nice to at least make a last-ditch effort to save the progeny of this tree,” she says.

No cones were collected before this year, Wellner explains, because there are at least 300 trees in the district already identified for their blister rust resistance. Until this year, the Giant White Pine’s demise wasn’t imminent.

No successor to the Giant White Pine will be named before October when Ron Mahoney, who directs the Big Tree Program for University of Idaho, returns from sabbatical. The next biggest white pine probably grows on the Palouse District or on the Pierce Ranger District, says Way.

Since 1969, when Way began working for the Palouse District, he’s tromped through most of it and knows of some other pockets of big, old-growth pine. None is as close to a road, though, as the Giant White Pine. If it turns out the Palouse District does have the next big tree, proximity to a highway may determine how much the district promotes it. Wellner said the district spent more than $10,000 paving a handicapaccessible trail to the western red cedar.

Now, there’s a tree. At 177 feet, it’s shorter than the Giant White Pine, but by other measures, it dwarfs it. It is nearly 57 feet in circumference and is an estimated 3,000 years old. The cedar is the biggest of its kind east of the Cascades. Way says he’s heard the biggest one in the country, near Forks, Wash., “isn’t real healthy. It’s on the way out. We’ll have the biggest red cedar in the U.S.”

In contrast to the stars of the Palouse woods, the black hawthorn is virtually ignored. At 20 feet, 5 inches tall, it’s little more than an overgrown shrub. “It’s still growing back there behind Laird Park,” says Wellner. “It’s perfectly healthy, but the trail’s practically gone. People don’t care about looking at a little tree with a lot of prickles on it.”

From ground level, the Giant White Pine rises like Jack’s beanstalk, disappearing into the sky. A trail from the campground leaves the creek bottom and climbs the ridge, and there is a point just off the trail where one can look straight at the top of the Giant White Pine. It towers 30 feet above any other tree, a few bare branches looking like gnarled fingers and a couple of other branches fringed with dead needles.

Its place in the skyline is held tentatively now. When the tree finally falls, there will be no sign from atop the ridge that it ever existed.

That’s life and death in a forest, says Wellner. Some time ago, an old forest service hand, trying to impress on him the transitory nature of these woods, told him three things: “Somebody’s going to die drinking the water at Laird Park. Somebody’s going to find a bigger cedar on the Pierce Ranger District, and the Giant White Pine’s going to die.”

“Well,” says Wellner, “he’s been right on one of three.”