Early morning light slips through the geometric patterns of windshield frost as I drive cautiously around the dizzying curves and terraces of central Utah’s State Road 25. At nearly 9,000 feet, minute particles of sparkling snow flutter unexpectedly from October skies and melt softly into the blackened road. Mule deer, hoping to reach an unknown haven of vegetation in a distant gully, force my partner Logan and I to brake suddenly with their erratic road crossing. Looking up at a blunt ridge, vaporous exhalations backlit in sunlit gold alert us to the passing presence of hunters otherwise steeped in deep-red willow. Their orange outlines move forward, shotguns at the ready, hoping to flush fallow from frosted underbrush. In the distance, we spot thick stands of trees, mostly leafless, and know we’re on the right track. Around a final, winterblue bend, we come into view of a hillside draped in incendiary yellows, oranges, and reds, all fluttering in symphonic coordination. I gasp in delight—here it is—cloaked in an autumnal tunnel of colorful leaves, the oldest and largest living organism on the planet.

——————

On a pale spring day many millennia ago, a single aspen seed separated from its parent tree, drifted lightly over a viridescent Colorado plateau, and settled finally in the wet, soft soil of a sun-drenched, east-facing slope. Taking root, the seed emitted vivid and distinct green shoots called ramets, genetically identical and connected through a hardy root system. In the ashy trunks of these ramets, songbirds now long-extinct sang of spring and fall, watching as plant species grew and decayed under shifting climate regimes. Through fire, flood, and landslide, the aspen stand endured—little ramets breaking through soil, time and time again, towards the warmth of an aging sun. As paleolithic people established a mammoth-hunting camp 14,000 years ago, as the Fremont people dried fish on the shores of the lake below, and as the Ute tribe fought the white Utah militia for rights to the land beneath a speckled canopy, the aspen stand stood quaking.

Over 14,000 to 1 million years of change, the fragile seedling grew to become the enormous aspen stand we now call Pando. Yet despite demonstrating incredible resilience over many millennia of disturbance, Pando, the oldest and largest of all trees on earth, is beginning to wither away. Over the last 100 years, federal and state mismanagement of forests encouraged land-use practices of overgrazing, predator eradication, and fire suppression in many places across the American West. On the Forest Service land surrounding Pando, these same practices have led to the death of growing saplings. In order to preserve Pando, the Forest Service recently introduced controversial regulatory measures around the organism, measures which have centered Pando in local and national land-use debates about the importance of preserving struggling species in a climate-changing world. So, I decided to visit Pando to gather stories from visitors and locals, and to attempt to center my own understanding of the controversy over the preservation of species in peril.

————

After a large sign marked “You Are Now Entering the Pando Aspen Stand,” we stop the car at a cattle grate, get out, and with a stretch, enter the shade of a giant. Catching glimpses of the topaz-hued Fish Lake below, we hear the intermittent moo-ing of distant black cattle and note their large tracks and signature plop piles. The delicate tracks of mule deer weave in and around their bovine neighbors’. I find myself wondering how many species have been protected and nurtured by this ancient being over the course of its long existence. Humans, I think, are certainly one of them. Emerald-green ground juniper covers much of the forest floor, and where it doesn’t, clumps of grasses and the periodic sedge intrude upon the well-trodden path we follow. Plump American robins bounce from sawed-off logs to living branches, and in watching their enjoyable dance, I bump against a tree and coat my arm in soft white powder. In a moment, I’m returned to the smoky light of an early-fall aspen stand in southern Wyoming, my tired, soot-covered hand contemplating this same powder. As a former hotshot firefighter based out of Colorado, aspen stands were almost always with me on my hardest days, providing shelter from relentless sun or cold rain. Always a gift. I think not only of my own experience with these trees, but of their ability to nurture and uphold many ecosystems in the American West, and their fate in the face of a changing and fragmented world.

The soft crunch of approaching footfall pulls me back to this ancient stand. A man in his late forties appears from the forest, struggling with a cumbersome camera. He grunts when he sees me, tries to skirt around me, and only begrudgingly consents to an interview when I manage to blockade him between a tree and the gate. Ethically questionable, but effective. Tom Woodward of Sedona, Arizona, retired lawyer, is, “yes, here to see Pando.” His “photography club comes here every few years to document the color change.” With raised eyes and a hopeful smirk, he asks, “You do know that Pando is the oldest living organism on earth? Also the largest.” I nod yes, and consider what draws many recreationalists, including myself, to this stately stand.

Though Pando is a remarkable clone, its species, quaking aspen, is the most widely distributed native North American tree, ranging from the eastern forests of the United States to the semi-arid American West (Rogers 2). So why does this particular stand garner attention from the likes of myself, a graduate student at the University of Utah, reporters from the New York Times, and scientists with the Forest Service and the Smithsonian?

Aspen utilize two means of reproduction—sprouting and seed production. Sprouting tends to be more successful than seed production, and also results, as the Forest Service notes, “in many genetically identical trees, in aggregate called a ‘clone.’ All the trees in a clone have identical characteristics and share a root structure,” like different limbs emerging from the same body (U.S. Forest Service). An average aspen clone can range in size from two to several thousand ramets, but Pando, a male aspen, has nearly 47,000 individual ramets. In fact, by mass, Pando is purportedly the largest living organism on Earth, weighing in at nearly 13.5 million pounds, and sprawling out over 106 acres (Mitton and Grant 27). But just as significantly, Pando stands as a requiem to thousands of years, ways of life, and species long gone. Although scientists continue to debate the age of the clone, estimates place Pando somewhere between 14,000 and 1 million years old, making the tree one of the oldest living organisms on the planet.

Sedona Tom warms up with a little knowledge shared, and as our conversation closes, I ask whether he feels connected to the stand. “I do. It feels like being in here, I can imagine the lives of the people who lived here before, all the time that has passed. It just gives you some kind of strength.”

A glistening layer of frost on the dirt parking lot thaws as I ask two older hikers, just returned from a chilling hike in the stand, where they’re from: “Pennsylvania. So we know the cold. Though this elevation is getting to us!” shivers the woman with twinkling brown eyes and a long, silver ponytail. “We’re Betsy and Ron Arnold, but I think we’d prefer to, er, keep our age a secret.” She laughs and nudges Ron, a tall, thin man with deep wrinkles and gnarled hands. After Ron’s retirement from the Department of Transportation, they decided to take off and tour the west in their camper. I ask what brought them here, to Fish Lake, the National Forest that houses Pando, and what they were expecting to encounter. Again, Betsy responds: “We were just down in Torrey at a little inn, and our hostess said that the fall colors up here were amazing! We’ve been missing the hardwoods back east. We’re kinda leaf-peepers, ya know?” I ask if they know that they just walked through Pando, and Ron grunts that he “saw the sign on the highway with something about that.” Betsy and Ron don’t know what Pando is, so I fill them in on what details I can. “Wow!” Betsy gasps. “The biggest thing on the planet? I did think all these trees seemed pretty big.”

Though roots account for most of Pando’s mass, Betsy is right in commenting on the size of these particular trees. Nearly all of the ramets visible today are 100 years or older, and show it in their mature size and stature. Unfortunately, aspen ramets usually live around 120 years or less, and the continued vitality of an aspen colony depends upon the regeneration of younger ramets—a critical process no longer happening at Pando. Utah State University ecologist Paul Rogers, who has been studying Pando for over twenty years, notes that “if Pando were a community of humans, it would be as if a whole town of 47,000 had only 85-year-olds in it” (Klein). These old, tall trees are beautiful, but they are a retirement community. I ask Ron and Betsy why they think the tree might not be regenerating. Betsy looks at me expectantly, shrugs her shoulders, and posits “climate change?”

My partner Logan and I move down the road to the local lodge, where a broad man in his late twenties ratchets a boat down to a trailer. The attached pickup is loaded with furniture, fishing poles, and a pile of wool blankets. He seems to be moving. A fishing guide in the area, Sheldon Brown is a Utahn, 27 years old, and wrapping up the last week of his season. A local, Sheldon shrugs off the introductory questions that seemed to thrill Betsy and Ron. “Yeah, Pando is pretty. We get a lot of people up here stopping for a look. I’ve walked around in it a bit, but to be honest, when it comes right down to it, it’s just a bunch of trees.” I think of correcting him to make a point. They’re actually ramets. But objectivity gets the better of me. Sheldon mentions that his “dad was a rancher in southern Utah, and it seemed like the government just kept placing all these restrictions on him. They choked him out of the cattle business for a lot of dumb shit like this.”

By “dumb shit like this,” Sheldon means the protective measures scientists and the Forest Service have implemented to preclude Pando’s demise and encourage its growth. Ecologist Paul Rogers has documented its “rapid decline due to overstory mortality and chronic recruitment failure” which he, and many other scientists, attribute to “drought, herbivory, fire suppression, development, and past management practices” (Rogers and Gale 1). In response to these issues, Rogers and his team have implemented a multi-tiered experimental management practice which includes exclosure fences meant to keep herbivores like mule deer and cattle out, selective cutting of older trees in hopes of encouraging young saplings to grow in overstory gaps, prescribed burning to simulate regular wildfire activity, and removal of shading shrubs like ground juniper (1). Though Rogers notes the impact of interrupted fire regimes and local development, he cites “unchecked herbivory” as the source of most of Pando’s woes (Rogers and McAvoy 12). In response to Rogers’s findings, the Forest Service banned the cattle grazing that decimated the growth of saplings. However, the local extinction of natural predators has led to an abundance of mule deer in the area, who continue to heavily graze Pando’s understory for saplings in the spring and summer, and depend on the nutrients provided by the cambium layer of aspen bark in the winter (2). Therefore, the Forest Service enclosed large tracts of Pando in exclosure fences. Over his three-year study period, Rogers saw a 4-fold increase in regeneration in areas where exclosures were present, with even better results where prescribed burning, selective cutting, and shrub removal were also implemented (Rogers and Gale 7). Outside of the exclosures, no regeneration was noted.

Yet, when considering an organism as ancient and resilient as Pando, what is Sheldon, a man who hunts the area’s abundant mule deer and whose family raised cattle, meant to feel? He continues on to say that “animals have been hanging out in that forest for a long time. They say it’s really old. So a lot of fires must have come through and burned it down. Lots of animals must have eaten it. Why would cattle and a few deer make that much of a difference? If it’s been through that much, it doesn’t seem like a fence would do much good.” He suggests, not unflinchingly, that “things just die.” I ask him what species he considers worthy of preservation. He says, “the ones we can eat.”

Driving back to Salt Lake, we stop for one last look at the giant’s ample trunks. I gather fallen leaves, streaked with dark red, aglow with golden sheen, purple with age, and press them in my journal. Lastly, I turn to my partner and sigh. “Do you think this is worth protecting?” For me, the answer is easy: yes. Breath comes easier to me in an aspen stand. But Logan is a sawyer on a hotshot crew in Alaska. He makes his living cutting down trees. As a testament to the unknowability of the minds of individual members of even our own species, I’m not sure how he’ll feel. He pauses, looks up at the golden canopy, sucks in a deep, cold breath, and exhales “yes.”

The efficacy of the exclosures in regenerating young saplings points to the abatement, and perhaps even solution of Pando’s declining health. After all, improper forest management, the local extinction of predators, and cattle grazing allowances—all human misjudgments—have led to Pando’s stagnation. If we have the ability to simply solve the problem we created, as we so rarely do, it seems logical to devote resources to it. But in interviewing five recreationalists in Pando, the issue quickly complicates. Betsy and Ron enjoyed their visit, but Pennsylvania is a long way from Pando, and when asked whether they would devote time or their tax dollars to protecting Pando, they looked around awkwardly until Ron said, “Maybe? But there are a lot of things to spend money on.” What organisms do we save, and why? Some recreationalists, like Sheldon, would prefer a focus on the preservation of species that can be hunted, while the photographer, Tom, who revels in the fall colors gifted by Pando, donates money to aspen restoration science through the Western Aspen Alliance. The question persists then: what are we willing to do to save a species? If the testimonies of these four individuals are any indication of the sentiments held towards species preservation in our nation broadly, the question might not be what we are willing to do to save a species, but rather, are we even willing at all?

Works Cited

Klein, Joanna. “Pando, the Most Massive Organism on Earth, Is Shrinking.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 Oct. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/science/pando-aspens-utah.html.

Mitton, Jeffry B., and Michael C. Grant. “Genetic Variation and the Natural History of Quaking Aspen.” BioScience, vol. 46, no. 1, 1996, pp. 25–31., doi:10.2307/1312652.

Rogers, Paul C., and Darren J. Mcavoy. “Mule Deer Impede Pando’s Recovery: Implications for Aspen Resilience from a Single-Genotype Forest.” Plos One, vol. 13, no. 10, 2018, pp. 1–19., doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0203619.

Rogers, Paul C., and Jody A. Gale. “Restoration of the Iconic Pando Aspen Clone: Emerging Evidence of Recovery.” Ecosphere, vol. 8, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–15., doi:10.1002/ecs2.1661.

U.S. Forest Service. “How Aspens Grow.” Forest Service Shield, www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/beauty/aspen/grow.shtml.