>> Hello, students. This is Plants and Animals of Southern California and today we're traveling over the San Gabriel Mountains from the ocean side to the desert side. And this is the same path that air bearing rain also follows. So air from the ocean that's humid comes during a storm across these mountains and as it moves up the mountains what happens is it cools down. And when humid air cools, the water condenses and rain falls out of it, so that's why this is the rainy side of the mountain. And then this air that no longer has any moisture in it, it goes down the mountain on the desert side and on the desert side it warms up and so it can take on even more water and that's why evaporation is so great on the rain shadow side of the mountains. So here we are. This is Red Box. This is our first stop. And it's a little less than 5,000 feet. There's several conifers here but there's two that we've seen a lot of that are native. One is big cone Douglas-fir, big cone Douglas-fir. And it's a narrow endemic to Southern California. It lives only in Southern California. And its closest relative is the Douglas-fir that is known by lumbermen and that you build houses with, like rafters, and girders, and so on. So it's a very strong structural wood. And that other species of Douglas-fir, it lives up the Sierra Nevada, up the Cascades, and then down the Rockies, so it's a very widespread species, whereas ours just lives in the transverse ranges and a little bit of the peninsula ranges. It has bigger cones. It also is very branchy and it has branches that kind of go out almost horizontally, almost horizontally, and dip down a little bit. So that's big cone Doug-fir. The second species that's native that's all around us here grows a little bit more on sunny sides, whereas big cone Doug-fir is mainly a north facing slope thing, or, you know, like it gets a little bit of shelter some place. And the other species is Coulter pine. It has these massive cones. Look at these cones. See, they have great big prickles. I think maybe these cones are like this as an adaptation against some giant rodent of the Pleistocene that preyed on its seeds or something like that. Anyway, I don't think it really needs the big cones now but it's stuck with them. And it's a three-needle pine so just can pull of the needles and they come off in bundles and that's true of all pines. And then there's three needles in a bundle usually. The needles are a kind of a bluish-green. And the plant is a relatively squat tree compared to some of the ones that we'll see later. Now there's also a number of other conifers here that I think were introduced, at least some of them were. Maybe one that's worth mentioning is knobcone pine. This is a pine that has cones that stay on the tree and they kind of stay stuck together so the seeds are inside of the cones for years, and years, and years. Then when a fire comes through, the tree burns and the tar on the outside of the cones melts and then the cones open and drop their seeds right after the fire and that's how they regenerate. Okay. Well, we'll get back in the van and then we'll head up to our next stop. Here we are, Carlton Flats, and here we are right next to a incense cedar. See, it's got kind of stringy bark, red, stringy bark when it gets really large like this. There were actually some incense cedars at the last stop but now they've really come into their own. And there's a lot of incense cedars around here. Some of them are really tall, great big trees. The branches are like, I would call them sprays. They're green sprays and the leaves are little scale-like leaves, not really needles like a pine or a fir. And if you look at the cones here, they're very different than the cones of a pine or of a fir. The other tree that's all around us now are some kind of yellow pine, probably ponderosa, but we don't really need to distinguish too much between the two kinds of yellow pine that are here: Ponderosa pine and Jeffrey pine. They're both great, big, tall trees, or can be. They are three-needle pines. The needles are a little bit shorter than a Coulter pine, and the cones are a lot smaller than a Coulter pine. And right here the trees grow really tall. You'll notice that some of them have holes in them that were drilled by acorn woodpeckers where the acorn woodpeckers store their acorns. And the differences between this and a Jeffrey pine, if you're real aficionados, are first, that I think Jeffrey pine has slightly longer needles, just slightly longer needles, and it has bigger cones. And the cones of a Jeffrey pine, the prickle on them is turned in a little bit more than the cones of a ponderosa. So we would say Jeffreys are gently and pondies are prickly. Also, a great, big Jeffrey pine would smell kind of like vanilla or like butterscotch. Whereas a ponderosa pine tends to smell a little bit more like Pine-Sol. Okay. Back into the van. Here we are at Cloudburst Summit. This is right about 7,000 feet. And there might be some big cone Doug-fir around here, but I don't see any. So it's pretty much dropped out. And Coulter pine is pretty much dropped out. We still have incense cedar, although I think it's probably becoming a little rarer. And then we've taken on three new species. First, Jeffrey pine. This is a lot like the ponderosa pine down low and we can still call it yellow pine if you'd like, that's what lumbermen would do, pooling those two species together. And then we've come in also to white fir. White fir, it has single needles that are not in bundles. They're about an inch long. Some people would say they're shaped like hockey sticks. And see, look at the cones, they're, the cones are at the top of the tree there and they look like little candles that are sticking up. Those cones completely fall apart at maturity and so we never see the cones of white fir on the ground. Okay. The other new species that we see here, besides Jeffrey pine and white fir, is sugar pine. And it's a five-needle pine so if you pull off a bundle like this and then count it, it's S-U-G-A-R, five needles. And sugar pine is so named I hear because when the pioneers came out from the East, they were used to tapping sugar maples for maple syrup and they found they could do something similar with sugar pines and so this was named sugar pine, although I think the syrup from sugar pine is not nearly as good as the syrup from sugar maple. Okay. Back in the car. Here we are at Dawson's Saddle. This is, I think, the highest point of the road, very close to 8,000 feet. And right here you can see the first lodgepole pine. Lodgepole pine are these tall trees, and we'll go through a whole, we'll walk through a whole forest of them a little bit higher up. They're closest relative is beach pine which grows only on the beach. They're usually put in different subspecies. And they both have two needles, see, two needles. And then these cones that are about the size of golf balls, little bit fragile compared to a lot of the other cones we've been seeing. And then, of course, we still see lots and lots of Jeffrey pine, and sugar pine around here, and white fir. Okay. So now we're walking up the trail. And this is kind of a pilgrimage. This is a pilgrimage to the land of limber pine. Limber pine will be the species that we see at the highest elevation. Okay. Here we are. We've walked through lots of areas and some of the areas, especially like the north facing slopes, we were seeing lots of lodgepole pines and the bark is kind of vaguely reminiscent of having a gray corn flake glued on all over the bark. And then we've just come into seeing some limber pines. So we made it on our pilgrimage. This is another five-needle pine just like sugar pine. And it would be pretty hard to tell sugar pine from limber pine if you just had a little sprig. The cones are a lot smaller than the sugar pine cones. Sugar pine cone can reach a foot in length, whereas a limber pine cone would maybe be four or five inches in length. And it's a much shorter tree. It really grows only on the tops of mountains. And the cool thing about it is that it's dispersed by Clark's Nutcrackers. Here's some Clark's Nutcrackers that we can see right in this tree here. And those Clark's Nutcrackers, they're kind of related to jays, and they collect pine nuts, and then stash the pine nuts in various places, in caches. And they'll come back and find the pine nuts. But anyway, they disperse pine nuts. And they dispersed limber pine on mountaintops throughout the West. And here's another neat thing about it, in Europe there's also a pine tree and there's also a nutcracker. They're not the same species of pine tree and the same species of nutcracker. It's a white pine and it's still, you know, in the same genus of nutcrackers. And so what that makes me think is that probably this relationship between the pine tree and the nutcrackers, it predates the origin of the particular species of pine tree and the particular species of nutcracker. All right. So now we can turn around and walk back down the mountain, now on the desert side. Okay. We're at our next stop. We've come down the mountain several thousand feet and we've lost most of those trees that we were seeing. I think there's maybe an occasional ponderosa pine, and then I think I saw a Coulter pine a little bit ago. But this is a pinyon pine. And it's still a pine if you pull off the needles, at the base of the needles you can see the little sheath around the needles. But it's a one-needle pine. So it's a cluster of needles but, a bundle of needles but a bundle of only one needle. And these are kind of short trees, not very tall. They don't have to be tall because they grow in the desert. They kind of grow at this elevation as a rim around the desert, so not in the flatlands of the desert, but at a certain elevation in the desert mountains all around the rim. And we might even call that the pinyon juniper zone. We'll see juniper at the next stop. And these pinyon pines are the ones that make the greatest nuts. So these nuts from this species of pinyon, or any of the other species of pinyon, but this is the species of pinyon we have in California, these nuts are what you mix in with your pesto and the Native Americans also loved pine nuts. Okay. This is the last stop in our grand conifer tour. And this is California juniper. California juniper has more or less separate sexes. So here's a female which has cones on it that are female cones. And I guess this is probably a male and it has cones on it that are male cones. The female cones are, of junipers, maybe not this species, but of other junipers are used to flavor gin. But anyway, California juniper is really a shrub, not a tree. It stays pretty close to the ground and it occurs slightly below pinyon pine but kind of overlapping in its range. So California juniper. That's all that I have to say about that.

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