Whitebark Pine | Chapter Four

Collecting pinecones, planting seeds, and other acts of hope.

The Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/ Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation: https://whitebarkfound.org/ Pictures of whitebark pine: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmWJ2S4F Ben Cosgrove Music: https://www.bencosgrove.com/

See more show notes on our website: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/photosmultimedia/headwaters-podcast.htm

Collecting pinecones, planting seeds, and other acts of hope.

The Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/ Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation: https://whitebarkfound.org/ Pictures of whitebark pine: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmWJ2S4F Ben Cosgrove Music: https://www.bencosgrove.com/

See more show notes on our website: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/photosmultimedia/headwaters-podcast.htm

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

[pensive guitar music begins playing]

Doug: You get a really unique perspective being in the top of them, looking at these like big, beautiful cones. Nothing like a whitebark pine cone.

Peri: Back in July, I found myself high on a ridge on the east side of the park, overlooking the Blackfeet Reservation, listening to climbing gear jingle like wind chimes. [climbing gear clacking together]

Annie: Doug has nice long arms to reach out on those branches.

Doug: You think I have nice arms Annie?

Annie: You have nice arms, Doug. [everyone laughs]

Peri: Doug Tyte is a member of Glacier's revegetation crew. Every summer, the park sends Doug, with his long arms, and the rest of the reveg crew to find and then climb healthy whitebark pine trees that have lots of cones. And because whitebark pine cones grow way at the end of the top of their branches, Doug had to climb way up and reach way out to get them. Dangling from Doug's harness were homemade wire mesh cages, the size and shape of a gallon Ziploc bag that he slid over the ends of cone laden branches, crimping down the edges and locking the cones off from the world.

Doug: Three!

Reveg Crew: Three. Three!

Peri: Each time he put on a new cage, Doug would shout down to everyone below the number of cones in it.

Doug: Five!

Reveg Crew: Five! Five.

Peri: But that was back in July. It's a few months later now in September, and I'm revisiting the tree with Doug, only to find that not all of the cages did their job.

Peri: [in the field] Yeah, you can see the claw marks all the way up the trunk.

Peri: The fresh claw marks showed that a bear had taken interest in this tree and its cones.

Levi: See how deep the nails went in.

Peri: [in the field] Yeah, wow.

Levi: Dang.

Doug: It's pretty cool.

Peri: [in the field] It is impressive.

Doug: You can see there's tons of old claw marks too on this thing.

Levi: Yeah, this one has claw marks every year, it seems like.

Peri: After confirming that all bears had vacated the tree, we got set up to climb the tree again.

[guitar music plays softly]

Doug: [climbing gear jingling and clacking] Alright. Lanyards,.

Carleton: Four inch, you good?

Doug: Got my four inch.

Carleton: Some webbing?

Doug: I got webbing. New fancy one.

Peri: [in the field] So how long have you been climbing trees

Doug: Since I could walk. [laughs] But for the government for two years.

Peri: [in the field] So Doug's climbing up the tree, he's making it look pretty easy, actually. How many cones do you think are on this tree?

Doug: Total? I think we got an estimate when we climbed it.

Carleton: 215. He caged 107.

Peri: [in the field] Wow.

Carleton: Using twenty two cages.

Peri: [in the field] How does that compare to other trees? It's just like...

Carleton: It's pretty—it's a high number. I think our highest number of this season was 200...

Peri: The trees they climb are special. Most whitebarks I see around the park do not have hundreds of cones. It's pretty rare for these trees to start producing cones before they're at least 50 years old. And even then, the younger ones usually only manage to grow a handful.

Doug: I mean, this tree isn't that large.

Peri: [in the field] No.

Doug: But it's like a good cone producer.

Peri: After all we've learned about how many species rely on whitebark pine seeds, it seems a little strange that we're actively preventing animals from accessing them. But even on these trees, only about half the cones are caged.

Peri: [in the field] Doug actually told me a story on the way up that once he was caging cones on a tree that had sort of two main trunks coming up, and this nutcracker landed in the one next to him and was just kind of harassing him: “caw, caw, caw”—like, "what are you doing? Those are supposed to be my cones!"

Peri: Perched in the top of the tree, Doug pulls off the cages with the cones inside, then carefully tosses them down to the crew waiting below. Kind of like a bride tossing her bouquet to the waiting bridesmaids.

Doug: Okay, this is gonna be a tricky throw.

Levi: Yup.

Doug: Ready?

Levi: Yup. [catching sound]

[Headwaters season two theme starts playing: somber piano music]

Peri: So everyone is kind of packing up all their gear, and someone hands me this big burlap sack with all of the cones in it from this tree. And it's pretty light, but it kind of makes me think that there's a lot in this bag. The seeds in these cones are our answer to blister rust—they're the hope for our future forests, and they have a long journey ahead of them.

[Theme music ends]

Peri: Hi, I'm Peri.

Andrew: I'm Andrew.

Michael: And I'm Michael. This is Season Two of Headwaters, a podcast from Glacier National Park.

Andrew: This is Chapter Four of a five-episode season, which is all about whitebark pine. In the past three episodes, we've learned about why this tree is important to people and our cultures, how so many pieces of our ecosystem are connected to it, and why it's at risk.

Peri: Now we're going to meet the people trying to save it.

[short segment of guitar music plays to mark a transition]

Peri: The world of whitebark pine is full of giants. Everywhere I turn, I encounter another brilliant ecologist who's been studying these trees for longer than I've been alive. Luckily for me, a group called the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation has gathered all of these giants together. In 2021, the High Five conference, as in five-needle pines, was hosted virtually, and with help from the Glacier Conservancy, I registered to attend.

Rob: We have a terrific conference planned for you...

Peri: The conference is a three-day event with over 100 different talks, all in service of saving a tree. Sitting in to listen, I got to hear about all the work still being done to shape the future of whitebark pine restoration.

Diana T: [fading in under Peri’s narration, then back out] I look forward to seeing you all at the question and answer panel discussion, after...

Peri: And who better to talk with about the history of whitebark pine restoration than two leaders in the field?

Diana T: [voice over the phone] I'm Diana Tomback…

Peri: Diana is a professor in Integrative Biology, and one of the foremost names in whitebark pine.

Diana T: [laughs] pulling it off my shelf

Peri: Reaching up to grab it early in her video call, Diana literally wrote the book on whitebark restoration. But when she started her career in the 70s doing research on whitebark pine and Clark's nutcrackers…

Diana T: There was nothing on my radar screen, nothing on the horizon to indicate that this species would be in the trouble that it is today. We have to thank Steve Arno and Jim Brown for the foresight back in the 1980s to realize that the Northern Rockies was losing its whitebark pine.

Peri: I also connected with Bob Keane, a now-retired Forest Service scientist that has worked on whitebark for decades.

Bob: [voice over the phone] I was working with Steve Arno and his research that he was doing in the high elevations, and well, what I saw was the fact that there were many whitebark pines that were dead. And I just thought it was, this is what happens up high when plants grow, they often die because it's so cold and icy and snowy up here. But Arno said, no, no, these plants can easily handle the ice and cold. These trees are dying because of an exotic blister rust.

[slightly ominous banjo music begins playing]

Peri: There was no single turning point that woke everyone up to the decline of whitebark pine. Instead, it was this slow accumulation of new science and growing concern. That said, one moment did stand out. In 1998, Bob, Diana, and other leaders in the field gathered for a conference and presented data that showed just how rapidly whitebark was declining. But it was what happened after the conference, after the talks ended, and the posters were packed up, that Diana said was pivotal.

Diana T: And that conference, Restoring Whitebark Pine Ecosystems, is the one that really made a bunch of us think, “Where do we go from here?” So I recall when the conference was over, it was that afternoon, and everyone had picked up and gone home except us. [laughing] We were sitting around with a can of beer or something asking each other, “Where do we go next?” And a suggestion was made by Dana Perkins, who's with the BLM, that perhaps we should consider forming a nonprofit.

Peri: That casual brainstorming turned into the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation, which has been a key advocate for whitebark pine science and restoration for the last 20 years. They're the central guiding organization for whitebark pine restoration, and the group hosting this conference.

Diana T: A number of us who came out of that era came to realize that the ecosystems that we were studying, they were deteriorating from various anthropogenic problems.

Peri: [to Diana] So once you recognized that blister rust was kind of the key problem and you knew you needed to take action, how did you know what to do? Did you have to start from scratch?

Diana T: Well, the tools were there already.

Peri: A stroke of luck, if you want to call it that, is that blister rust affects most five-needle pines, not just whitebark, including some important timber species like sugar pine and white pine. So people had already been thinking about how to fix this problem as early as the 1950s. So there was a bit of a road map for how to address this problem. What Diana and Bob had to do was adjust it to work for whitebark.

Diana T: Bob Keane was lead author, I was second author, on what became the restoration manual for whitebark pine.

Peri: The key was that some whitebark pine showed natural resistance to blister rust, just as scientists had observed with other five-needle pines back in the 50s. So the plan was to identify those resistant trees, grow their seedlings, and plant them back on the land, increasing the overall amount of resistance in the population. Bringing in all these different agencies and different disciplines is key to get the restoration plan right, especially considering that whitebark pine could soon be listed under the Endangered Species Act. As of fall 2021, it's already listed as endangered in Canada and is proposed for listing in the U.S.

Diana T: Well, my attitude is this is important work. It's probably a capstone piece of work for all the work that I've done on Whitebark Pine. But it's not over until the nutcracker caws or whatever, cracks. [both laugh] [sweet, hopeful piano music plays] You can't assume that things are going to tick along just fine. You have to keep putting that energy and that push there. So it's these kinds of things that have galvanized a number of us to actually act to do something.

Bob: I think it would be sad that for a person who's worked in that ecosystem for so long, if we didn't do anything, I would feel unbelievably guilty that I spent my career studying an ecosystem that was doomed to be absent from the landscape in the future. And I think we have a responsibility to actually restore this because we—humans—were the reason that the rust is actually here.

Peri: I also asked Bob what other conservation efforts could learn from whitebark pine.

Bob: It takes the zeal of others in order to get things done. And of course, I worked for the Forest Service all my career, I've seen this big agency and saw how things get done, and it's glacial. And if I look at all the great things that the Forest Service has done, it is all because of some dedicated zealous individual that went out despite everybody else, and on top of their regular job, went out and did something good for the land.

[piano music resolves and ends, marking a transition]

Peri: But having a plan is just the start. For every Diana Tomback and Bob Keane, who are figuring out how these trees work and creating a plan to restore them, you also need people like Doug Tyte, with his long arms, to climb the trees and harvest the cones, and Rebecca Lawrence, to shepherd the seeds on their journey and get them planted back on the landscape.

Peri: [in the field] This is a bag of cones that we collected the other day.

Rebecca: Yes.

Peri: [in the field] Cool.

Rebecca: Yes, it is.

Peri: [in the field] These are very sappy.

Rebecca: They are starting to dry out a little bit.

Peri: [in the field] Oh yeah, you can see some of the—

Rebecca: So you can you can peel off the scales and then you see the seeds sitting right in there.

Peri: [in the field] Oh, cool.

Peri: That's Rebecca, who's been coordinating Glacier's native plant restoration program for years. I met with her at Glacier's native plant nursery, this remarkable garden-like compound and greenhouse where they grow thousands of native plants. Rebecca and her team raise dozens of different species, which allows the park to restore plants after disturbances like construction projects. And like so many things at Glacier, the native plant program benefits from the support of the Glacier National Park Conservancy. Harvesting the cones is just the start of these seeds' journey, and Rebecca helped take us through the process. We send most of our whitebark cones, like the ones we collected at the start of the episode, to a Forest Service nursery in Coeur d'Alene Idaho, which is about four hours west of here. That nursery has special expertise in growing whitebark pine seedlings, and they can grow 300,000 of them a year, from all across the Rocky Mountains. After the cones arrive, Rebecca explained that the first step is also the messiest: opening the tough, sappy cone to get the seeds out.

Peri: [in the field] What's that like to open up a whitebark pine cone and get the seeds out? [laughs]

Rebecca: I really wish I had a beak [both laughing] to do the same thing that the Clarks Nutcrackers do very effortlessly, so it's definitely... [Rebecca’s audio fades out as Peri starts narrating]

Peri: Without beaks to rely on, nursery workers have another solution: heat. They store the cones at 105 degrees Fahrenheit, which causes them to dry and helps the scales open up a little bit, so the seeds can be shaken out. [shaking sound] The most challenging part is simulating the combination of environmental factors you need to get the seeds to actually germinate.

Rebecca: They're trying to mimic what it would go through in nature. They found that if they put the seeds in a warm stratification and then a cold stratification... [Rebecca’s audio fades out as Peri starts narrating]

Peri: Figuring all this out wasn't easy. It was kind of like having all the ingredients to bake a cake, but not knowing what temperature to bake it at or for how long. After 30 days in the warmth and 90 days in a walk-in cooler, seeds are ready to be planted in a little carrot-shaped pot.

Rebecca: They will plant that into the cone. Usually, they put one to two seeds per cone.

Peri: [in the field] And so when you say cone, you're not talking about pinecones, you're talking about the little—

Rebecca: Right. Sorry, that's confusing, isn't it? Yes, it's the cone-tainer [Peri laughs] is what it often gets called.

Peri: The seeds stay in their cone-tainers in the nursery for two years while they develop a root system strong enough to survive in the wild.

Rebecca: At one year, they don't have enough roots, they're not strong enough really to go out and be planted.

Peri: [in the field] Oh, okay.

Peri: Finally, Rebecca and her team pick up the two-year-old seedlings from the nursery and bring them back to the park to plant. All told, the process from caging to planting takes almost two and a half years, and the seeds will travel at least 500 miles.

[pensive piano music plays briefly, marking a transition]

Peri: So, Andrew. If we're following Diana and Bob's plan to restore whitebark pine, then we're maybe like halfway through?

Andrew: Yeah, it's a pretty long and complicated process. So far, we've identified the problem; we've collected the cones; and then we've sent them off to the nursery in Idaho. There, the seeds were extracted from the cones and planted in growing pots.

Peri: So on a really basic level, the plan is to restore whitebark by planting more of them in areas where they've died out, which seems simple enough. Want more whitebark in the park? Plant more whitebark. But we learned last episode that these trees are threatened by blister rust, which is an invasive fungus, and by pine beetles, which are native, but climate change is making them more deadly. How do we know that those won't just kill these new seedlings when we plant them back out in the park?

Andrew: Right. If the little seedlings we plant can't survive, then this whole effort doesn't get us anywhere. The whole restoration project centers on the fact that some trees are more resistant to these threats, and those trees are called plus trees. Simply put, plus trees are those selected for breeding because of their exceptional genes. The term can be used to denote trees that are special for a variety of reasons, like ones that produce a lot of fruit in an orchard. But for us, a plus tree would be one with genetic resistance to white pine blister rust.

Peri: So like an A-plus tree?

Andrew: Right.

Peri: So they only harvest cones and plant seedlings from trees that have demonstrated that they can survive. But walk me through this—what does genetic resistance mean?

Andrew: A tree is going to have all sorts of different characteristics. It might be tall or short, could be wide or narrow, fast growing, slow growing, it will have a color and a scent to it. Some of these traits are going to be determined by the tree's environment: how much rain and sun it gets, how cold or windy the location is. But trees also inherit some characteristics from their parents.

Peri: Trees have parents?

Andrew: Yeah.

Peri: I guess I never thought about it that way.

Andrew: [laughing] Yeah, a whitebark is going to have a mom and a dad, although not quite in the same way a human might. Whitebark pines are monoecious, which means that male and female cones grow on the same tree, so there's not separate male and female trees. Pollen from a male cone is blown by the wind onto a female cone on another tree, which fertilizes it and creates a seed. So if you picture a pine cone in your head, what you're probably imagining is one of the female cones. The characteristics that a tree inherits from its parents are called its genetic traits, and they're stored in the tree's DNA and can be passed on from generation to generation.

Peri: Okay, I'm remembering this from high school biology.

[pensive guitar music begins to play]

Andrew: Yeah, so some of the tree's characteristics might make it less susceptible to certain threats. For example, a tree might generate a lot of resin and be able to drown beetles that invade it. And if this resin-producing trait is genetic, then all the seeds that this tree produces could also have that trait. But if there's another tree that's also unaffected by beetles, but it's unaffected because it lives in such a cold environment that the beetles can't live there, that's not genetic. If its seed is planted in a warmer location, or if that location starts to warm up due to climate change, the beetle can still kill that tree—that protection doesn't last from generation to generation. So finding trees with inheritable resistance is really important. And luckily, there are some whitebark that are naturally resistant to blister rust. Here's Professor Diana Six, who we cored a tree with in the last episode. She's an expert in whitebark pine genetics.

Diana S: Why genetics are so important is that information is what can be passed on to offspring. Because if it can't be passed on to offspring, it's not going to help future populations or future generations. And so we get super excited if we can say it's genetic, because it means that it influences the future. And that information, that resistance can be passed on.

Andrew: People have been breeding plants and animals for desirable traits as long as agriculture has existed. That's the reason that things like corn or domestic dogs exist. So this concept is not new, but the application to conservation and specifically for whitebark pine restoration is a more recent technique.

Peri: Okay, so plus trees are important for their ability to create offspring that have resistance to rust or beetles. But how does genetic resistance work? Is there just a gene that kind of turns the resistance on or off, like a light switch?

Andrew: Well, first of all, it can be really difficult to locate specific whitebark pine genes because their genome, which is the sum total of all their DNA, is so huge. It's almost nine times larger than the human genome.

Peri: Wow.

Andrew: And to make it even more complicated, each pine might have quite different genes than its neighbors.

Diana S: The amount of genetic diversity in conifers is some of the highest in the world. And so when you look at these trees around here, they all look the same. They're all really different. They're more different than if we looked across a crowd of people at a concert—way more different.

Andrew: So if blister rust resistance came from a single gene, that would make things a little simpler…

Diana S: That makes it simple, or it makes it sound simple if there's one gene. But it's also dangerous because that means that the fungus or the beetle can evolve to overcome that. Most resistance involves a whole bunch of genes, a whole lot of mechanisms. And so it means that you're having to deal with a real mix, and that makes it more complicated to be able to select trees, maybe if you want to do replantings or things like that.

Andrew: Blister rust resistance appears to be one of those more complicated things, it's influenced by a handful of genes.

Diana S: Blister rust, there's been so much work on it, they're really beginning to narrow down five or six different aspects that produce resistance.

Peri: And so what about for beetles?

Andrew: Not as much is known about the genetic beetle resistance. Diana's research has found that beetles prefer to attack fast-growing trees, although it's not really clear how they would know if a tree is fast- or slow-growing.

Diana S: You know they're not out taking a core and going, “okay, this one,” you know? [laughs] So that's our question right now, and we're looking at things like non-structural carbons and sugars. But it is surprising that we know so little about the resistance. We know it's out there, but we don't know what's driving it quite yet.

Peri: Okay, that's getting pretty complicated. What are non-structural carbons?

Andrew: Yeah, I thought you might ask. It got a little bit confusing there. So trees, as I'm sure you know, are mostly made of carbon, and most of that carbon is in their wood. But wood is really tough. It's not very good to eat, even for a beetle, and the carbon that makes up the wood is called structural carbon.

Diana S: But then the carbon that's not structural is like sugars, carbohydrates, and these are things that fungi or insects going into a tree can use as food. And so we're looking to see if that isn't something that drives beetle choices of trees, and that somehow they use that to distinguish between these fast- and slow-growing trees.

Peri: Okay, so this is pretty cool. So the beetles can essentially taste how fast growing the tree is.

Andrew: That's right, a slow growth habit might confer resistance to beetles, and the beetles might be able to sense that through taste. But let's not get too far afield here. For our purposes, plus trees are those that are selected for breeding because they are, or at least likely to be, resistant to blister rust. And in turn, their offsprings are likely to be resistant to the rust as well. These plus trees make up the backbone of the whitebark pine restoration program in Glacier National Park.

Peri: So by picking which trees we collect cones from and then replant, we're kind of shepherding the genetic future of this tree.

Andrew: Yeah. Conservation genetics is really a big part of our strategy with whitebark pine restoration. We can shape the gene pool to include more rust resistant trees by being selective about the seeds that we use.

Peri: And so if we're trying to shape the genes of this species, is new technology like gene editing being used?

Andrew: Technology can definitely help us, but gene editing is not one of the tools currently being considered. Whitebark pine has so much genetic diversity on the landscape—diversity that might increase its resilience to climate change and beetles. So using the seeds of wild trees is still preferred, but technology could have an impact on this strategy. A scientist named David Neal is working on creating a “23 and Me” type test for whitebark pines.

Peri: One of those at home genetics tests to learn about your ancestry?

Andrew: Exactly. But this test could help biologists quickly and cheaply identify the trees that have those rust resistant genes. And then we can focus our limited resources on planting the seeds from trees that we already know for sure are rust resistant.

[acoustic guitar music plays briefly to mark a transition]

Peri: So we harvested cones from trees that show resistance to blister rust. And now we have seedlings that have grown from those seeds. But where do we plant them? It turns out that recently-burned areas are the perfect place, which is why I talked with the park's fire ecologist, Summer.

Summer: I'm Summer Kemp-Jennings.

Peri: Pretty much anywhere you get up high in Glacier, there are incredible sweeping views of the park, and you can almost always see evidence of past fires on the land around you.

Summer: I love it when you get up to a point like this in the park [sweet, hopeful banjo melody plays] and you can really see the effect of fire on a big landscape, and it just really is a mosaic across this entire landscape. In the Northern Rockies, fire is the primary disturbance agent, and as long as there has been vegetation in Glacier National Park, there has been fire in Glacier National Park. Because we have this ignition source called lightning. So fire is a part of this ecosystem.

Peri: But while whitebark seedlings grow well in burned areas, fire is a bit of a double edged sword for these trees.

Summer: Whitebark pine don't have as thick of bark as larch.

Peri: Which is a famously fire resistant tree here in Glacier.

Summer: Their survivability of fire is a lot lower. However post fire, the whitebark pine seeds do well in bare mineral soil and a high light environment, especially compared to, you know, other subalpine tree species.

Peri: [in the field] So it seems like, on the one hand, whitebark pine need fire because that's one of the primary places where they regenerate. But on the other hand, it seems like the mature trees are pretty easily killed by fire.

Summer: Yeah, that's definitely true. So it's kind of almost a little bit of a clash, right?

Peri: We kept hiking along this high ridge, which had just burned in the Sprague Fire four years earlier. And we kept an eye out for little whitebark seedlings, less than a foot tall.

Peri: [in the field, with footsteps in the background] There's some before the lookout and some after the lookout.

Summer: Well we could -- [gasps] -- there's one! [whispering]

Peri: [in the field] Oh, it's so cute.

Michael: I like how you whispered, like being loud would scare it away. [everyone laughs]

Summer: [jokingly whispering] Shhh! We have to approach it quietly. Oh yeah.

Peri: [in the field] So how do you think this one's doing?

Summer: It looks great to me. There's no yellowing. It looks vigorous.

[footsteps continue]

Peri: [in the field] Yeah, this one—that other one was just a single stem, with a big poof. And this one has a bunch of different stems coming up.

Summer: Yeah, that one's got some personality, for sure. Yeah.

Michael: A little tree coming up through literal pieces of charcoal.

Summer: Yes. Yeah. I mean, it's a tough life up here. You got to have some serious stamina. It's almost like this juxtaposition of death and new life. Kind of old forest and hopefully new forest. I like whitebark pine. [laughing]

Peri: [in the field] We do too!

Peri: With this bird's eye view from high up on these slopes, I could see in one glance these vulnerable little seedlings, alongside the still-standing burning trees from the fire four years ago, and the footprints from at least half a dozen past fires on the land around us.

Summer: You know, we're coming around to the idea that there's going to be more fire. So more fire means more whitebark pine are going to burn. You know, we can use Waterton as an example of that.

Peri: Our sister park in Canada, Waterton Lakes National Park, saw this firsthand. More than a third of Waterton burned in the 2017 Kenow Fire.

Peri: [in the field] So I talked to Rob and Genoa, who work on whitebark up there, and they said it burned—they said it basically took out a good portion of the work they've done for last 10 or 15 years. That's about half the whitebark pine seedlings, all the limber, and about half their plus trees. In one fire.

Summer: Yeah, it's devastating.

Peri: [in the field] Yeah.

Peri: Waterton has had their own whitebark and limber pine restoration program for decades, in close partnership with Glacier. And to me, the losses in the Kenow Fire kind of symbolize what whitebark is up against, and how climate change can so easily overpower the work that we're doing to combat pine beetles and blister rust. But Summer had a more encouraging perspective.

Summer: You know, it's really just a numbers game. And yes, some of them unfortunately might get burned. Or maybe it'll be a really bad winter, et cetera. But some of them will survive, and then you extend that through time, too, and it kind of becomes like a self-perpetuating legacy.

Peri: [in the field] For future generations.

Summer: Yeah.

Peri: [in the field] Yeah, because we won't see it, but it's a nice legacy to leave behind.

Summer: Yeah, and it'd be great to come up here, you know, when we're retired from the Park Service and, you know, see some of the whitebark pine that were planted still surviving.

Peri: [in the field] Because if we came back in 50 years, I'll be in my eighties.

Michael: Freshly retired.

Peri: [in the field] I'd like to think I could still hike this trail...

Summer: I'd like to think I'd be retired before then, but...

Peri: [in the field] For the best shot of seeing cones.

Summer: Yeah, totally.

Peri: [in the field] Those seedlings that we looked at would be taller than us. Maybe a few cones, little young for cone bearing, 50 years, but plausible.

Summer: Yeah, it'd be great.

Peri: [in the field] We can't save everything, but I hope that we can save whitebark pine. I think we've got a good shot.

Summer: Yeah, me too.

[wistful, hopeful music plays briefly to mark a transition]

Peri: Whitebark restoration faces a lot of barriers, but that doesn't deter our reveg crew, who are hiking nearly a vertical mile up Mount Brown to plant more seedlings this fall. I was not as excited to follow them up there. But it was a crisp, clear fall day and as I gained elevation, I got more and more expansive views. Across Lake McDonald to the North Fork, south toward the Great Bear wilderness and north toward the Highline. It was fall raptor migration too, so golden eagles kept soaring past just 50 or 100 feet overhead. [footsteps crunching on snow] Fresh snow had fallen the day before, coating the mountaintops, and as I reached the crew, it crunched beneath my feet. I felt grateful to be there, and grateful to this crew who were digging in the wet, snowy ground with cold, wet hands and cold, wet feet to get these seedlings in the ground. And they do hikes like this every week to reach whitebark sites, year after year.

Peri: [in the field] That looks like pretty physical work after a gigantic hike up here.

Rebecca: Yeah, it's—this site's not—other than the hike up here, it's fairly accessible. Some that we've done… are crazy.

Peri: At the time of this recording, the park has planted nearly 25,000 whitebark pine seedlings.

Peri: [in the field] So like ballpark, would ten percent of these surviving be good or bad? Would eighty percent be... Is that too much to hope for?

[hopeful music begins playing]

Rebecca: So one of our best plantings, we read the 10 year survival last year and it is still doing really, really well with 89 percent survival.

Peri: [in the field] Wow.

Rebecca: So I think that's—that's above what we normally expect. When you average everything out, we have 48 percent survival for whitebark, so that's pretty good.

Peri: [in the field] 50-50. That's probably better than most tree seeds out in the world.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Peri: [in the field] Oh, another eagle! Wow.

Rebecca: Oh two!

Peri: [in the field] Right overhead! So we're really just doing our best to be human Clark's nutcrackers.

Rebecca: Exactly. [both laughing]

[music ends]

Peri: With all the work that we've learned about that goes into getting these seedlings to this spot, I wanted to know how many hands have touched these little trees, from cone to nursery to planting.

Rebecca: We usually have at least four people, and if it's a tree with a lot of cones, we'll usually ask for some help from some of the other park crews to help us carry out the cones as well. Coeur d'Alene has five permanent staff, at least one packer, to bring them up

Peri: [in the field] Shoutout to the mules, too. [both laugh]

Rebecca: Yeah, exactly. There's a two person monitoring crew

Peri: [in the field] That's pretty cool, so it's like twenty five people, 30 people, at least... Five mules.

Rebecca: Yeah. These are expensive little seedings

Peri: [in the field] A lot goes into those.

Rebecca: Yes. Yeah, they do.

Peri: [in the field] Wow. It's cool to think about.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely.

Peri: [in the field] Yeah. Feels very hopeful to be planting these up here. Yeah.

Rebecca: I mean, just planting in general is very meditative and I think rejuvenates your soul.

Peri: [in the field] Yeah. Kind of an act of faith.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think it is. Especially when I'm watering them, I'll, you know, wish them well and hope that they survive.

Peri: [in the field] Yeah, maybe a few of these will become big, healthy, happy whitebarks that help reseed the landscape.

Rebecca: Yep.

[slight pause as music continues to play]

Peri: [in the field] It's pretty cool to see this little seedling kind of coming full circle from, you know, where it was harvested from the cones from one of the plus trees, goes to Coeur d'Alene, coming back to the park now. So in a way, it kind of feels like the end of the road for the seedling, at least while it's kind of in our care. But it's also just the beginning. It's, you know, hopefully will grow up to be a big cone-bearing whitebark pine that'll help regenerate the species here.

[music finishes]

Peri: [in the field] Caging the cones, harvesting the cones, germinating the seedlings, planting them back on the landscape, doing all the monitoring work and—this is so much work, and it's pretty amazing that… I guess aside from whether we can save whitebark as a species, [pensive piano music begins to play] it makes me hopeful just… for people? [tearful] It makes me feel really proud to be like, a tiny part of. There's so much destruction that people have wrought, and it's pretty cool to feel like we're doing a little bit to fix it. I don't know, I think it speaks well of all these people as humans that this is what they spend their time doing. I'm really glad we're trying.

[music finishes]

Andrew: Next week on Headwaters, we get our hands dirty.

[digging sounds]

Peri: [in the field] Any suggestions on my technique?

Melissa: You could swing a little a little more aggressively.

Peri: [in the field] Oh, there we go.

Andrew: As we uncover the past, present and future of conservation. That's next time on Headwaters.

[guitar music plays softly under the credits]

Peri: Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park with support from our partner, the Glacier National Park Conservancy. Glacier is the traditional lands of several Native American tribes, including the Aamsskààpipikani, Kootenai, Séliš, and Qìispé People. Headwaters was created by Daniel Lombardi. Andrew Smith, Peri Sasnett, and Michael Faist produced, edited and hosted the show. Ben Cosgrove wrote and performed our music, and Claire Emery let us use her woodcut piece titled Wind Poem for this season's cover art.

Peri: Special thanks this episode to Bill Hayden, Doug Tyte, Diana Tomback, Bob Keane, Rebecca Lawrence, Summer Kemp-Jennings, Cara Nelson, Rob Sissons, Genoa Alger, Carleton Gritts, Levi Besaw, everyone with Glacier's native plant program, the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation, and so many others. If you liked this episode, send it to that friend you have who just loves trees.

[music finishes]

Lacy: This is like for the end?

Daniel: This is it. Yeah. You saying that? That's going to be in it.

[Michael laughs]

Lacy: The Glacier Conservancy is the official fundraising partner of Glacier National Park. To learn more, visit glacier.org

Peri: I think that's the best time you've done yet.

Lacy: Okay, do I need to get one more time?

Michael: I think we're good.

Peri: Yeah, I think this is good.