Outdoors
& REC
The Observer & Baker City Herald
B
Saturday, November 19, 2022
Holiday hunting
The search for the perfect Christmas tree
BY JAYSON JACOBY
Baker City Herald
L
A GRANDE — The Blue Mountains started to look
like Christmas even before Halloween this year.
But the season of the jack-o’-lantern, of the over-
night stomachache induced by too many fun-size bars, is
too early to commence the search for the all-important
item of holiday decor.
The Christmas tree.
The problem, of course, is preservation.
Cut your tree too early and you’ll struggle to keep it
healthy enough that, come Christmas, the presents stacked
beneath the branches aren’t buried in drifts of desiccated
needles.
But with Thanksgiving looming, families across the
region will be preparing for their annual trip to the
mountains and the search for the tree that catches the
eye from across a grove, its shape seemingly perfect in
that instant, its limbs ideal to hold the ornaments that
have become heirlooms.
Each of the three national forests in the Blue
Mountains — Wallowa-Whitman, Umatilla and
Malheur — sells Christmas tree permits for $5.
There is a household limit of five permits.
Permits are also available from many busi-
nesses, or online at recreation.gov (which
charges an additional $2.50 processing fee).
If you have a fourth grader in the house the
permit is free. All fourth graders are eligible
to receive a free permit by presenting a paper
voucher printed from the Every Kid Out-
doors website, https://everykidoutdoors.
gov/
National forest permits are valid only for
public land managed by the Forest Service.
Where to search, what to look for
Trees, of course, tend to grow in groves.
And this is a typical trait for the grand and
white firs that are a favorite Christmas tree
in Northeastern Oregon forests.
When you come across a cluster of firs
— especially if they’re slathered in snow —
it can be difficult to distinguish between a
specimen with gaping gaps in its limbs or a
crooked trunk, and one that would
be the crowning holiday adorn-
ment for your living room.
Lest anyone worry about con-
tributing to deforestation by cut-
ting a Christmas tree, quite the
opposite is true, Forest Service
officials say.
Removing a small-diam-
eter tree can improve forest
health by reducing the com-
petition for sunlight, water and
nutrients, allowing remaining
trees to grow faster.
“In most parts of the forest, re-
moving small trees reduces the
risk of wildfire, helps other trees
to grow larger and more fire-re-
sistant, and creates open areas
that provide forage for wildlife,”
according to a press release from
the Forest Service. “So don’t feel
bad when you cut that little tree. You
are supporting a healthy forest.”
National forests in the
Blue Mountains are amply
endowed with multiple spe-
Christmas tree
permit vendors
Baker City
Bi Mart
D&B Supply
York’s
The Gold Post, Sumpter
Burnt River Market, Unity
Hitchin’ Post Grocery,
Mentzer & Elliott
Halfway Market, Halfway
Island City Market & Deli,
Island City
Wallowa Food City, Wallowa
Pendleton
Heppner Mobil, Heppner
Dollar Stretcher, Enterprise
D&B Supply
Alpine Outpost, Tollgate
Sports Corral, Joseph
Bi Mart
La Grande
Southgate Minimart
Zip Zone II, Milton-
Freewater
Bi Mart
Hermiston
Elgin Food Town, Elgin
Miller’s Home Center
Smitty’s Ace Supply
Athena Convenience, Athena
Hometown Hardware,
Union
Ace Hardware
Rhode’s Supply, Ukiah
Pilot Rock
Ace Hardware, Boardman
Richland
J&D’s Foodmart
Lisa Britton/Baker City Herald, File
Searching the woods near Phillips Reservoir, southwest of Baker City, for a Christmas tree during a previous December.
cies of conifers that are suitable for Christmas trees.
You’re not likely to find the symmetrical specimens of tree
farms or sales lots in towns, to be sure.
But browsing the orderly rows can’t fairly be called an ad-
venture.
Acquiring a tree in the forest, by contrast, often involves
trudging through snow, over the hills and through the
woods, with the likelihood of getting sticky sap on your
hands and clothes.
If you do venture into the forest, prepare for slippery
roads and chilly temperatures. Bring food, warm drinks
and extra clothing, and make sure somebody knows where
you’re going and when you expect to return.
See Trees / B6
123RF
Spring was snowy but Central Oregon glaciers still lost this year
BY MICHAEL KOHN
The Bulletin
I
n the battle against global warm-
ing, glaciers in the Central Oregon
Cascades have not fared well in
2022. Collier and Bend glaciers, two
massive sheets of moving ice high in
the mountains west of Bend, lost an
average thickness of 11 feet this sum-
mer.
“It was another lousy year to be a
glacier in Oregon,” said Gordon Grant,
a Corvallis-based research hydrologist
with the U.S. Forest Service.
Glaciers are critical features of Cen-
tral Oregon’s ecosystem as their late
summer melt helps bring cool, clear
water to rivers and streams in the fall
months, sustaining habitat for fish and
other aquatic wildlife.
The availability of water for irri-
gation districts in Central Oregon is
also threatened by the loss of glaciers
as they provide the farming commu-
nity with a steady source of late-season
run-off.
“These hot summers are dramati-
cally removing the ice volume in the
Central Cascades,” said Anders Carl-
son, president of the Oregon Glaciers
Institute, a nonprofit that documents
Oregon’s glaciers, measures their
health and projects the future of the
state’s glaciers. “This isn’t just warm
summers causing glacier margins to
retreat to higher elevations. The sum-
Anders Carlson/Oregon Glaciers Institute
Thinning on Bend Glacier resulted in the glacier being cut in half as bedrock knobs
melted through the ice and cut off the lower part of the glacier from its upper reaches
where snow accumulates. Now the glacier usually does not accumulate any snow.
mers are melting the glaciers away at
all elevations.”
The loss of 11 feet of ice from Col-
lier Glacier alone equates to 18,000
city buses, said Carlson. Converted
to water, 400 million gallons melted
away, enough to fill 650 Olympic-sized
swimming pools.
Glacial melt has been intense in
each of the past three summers and
four out of the last six, Carlson said.
The glaciers are melting in part be-
cause snowpack that normally rests on
top of the glaciers — protecting them
from the sun — has dwindled under
the intense summer heat.
Carlson said just 4% of Collier Gla-
cier had snow on it by the end of this
past summer. A healthy glacier should
have 70% of its surface covered by
snow at the end of summer, he said.
Any amount less than that results in a
net loss of glacier volume.
High elevation thinning of glaciers
expose bedrock, effectively splitting
up the glaciers into separate chunks.
When the lower and upper parts of a
glacier are disconnected, it prevents ice
in upper areas from replenishing the
lower reaches, hastening their disap-
pearance.
“This already happened in Bend
Glacier and is occurring right now on
Collier and Hayden glaciers,” Carlson
said.
A century ago Oregon was home to
at least 43 glaciers. There are just 27
left according to the institute. Glaciers
have been shrinking for decades, but
their rate of decline has accelerated in
recent years, Carlson said.
“This makes three years in a row
with no or minimal accumulation of
snow on Collier. In fact, we now have
six years of satellite measurements of
snow cover for Collier and four out of
those six years are abysmal,” Carlson
said.
Collier Glacier did gain mass in
2017 and 2019, but those gains were
wiped away by intense summertime
heat each summer since 2020.
“Central Cascade glaciers are almost
literally a block of ice taken out of the
freezer and plopped on your kitchen
counter where it melts on all sides, not
just the lowest elevation side,” Carlson
said.
The glacial melt this year came
during one of the hottest summers
on record in the Pacific Northwest. In
August, Oregon’s average temperature
was 6.6 degrees above normal, accord-
ing to data from the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration.
This year’s high temps follow the
heat dome event in June of 2021,
which shattered temperature records.
In 2020 the Pacific Northwest also ex-
perienced a long, hot summer that cul-
minated with the extreme Labor Day
forest fires.
While this year’s snowy spring and
cool June held promise for a better
year for glaciers, the hot August tem-
peratures and warm autumn reversed
those gains.
Summers are also growing longer in
duration, Carlson said, with the month
of October being unusually dry in re-
cent years.
“I really thought we’d have a year
of net gains on the glaciers, or at least
not insane losses of mass, as the snow-
pack was quite high coming into the
summer due to that cold and snowy
spring,” Carlson said.
“Even when you think the cards are
dealt in your favor, global warming has
some trump cards up its sleeve.”