So by yesterday we were ready to venture out from the Thanksgiving home and do some hiking up top Mount Lemmon. Headed to Marshall Gulch again, and did the Marshall Gulch/Aspen Trail loop. This is the area where the Aspen fire began a few years ago, and it’s been fascinating to hike it every so often and watch the forest come back.
It’s only mid-autumn down in Tucson, but it was late autumn (and chilly) up on the mountain. The trees were all bare, except for the occasional evergreen baby pine; it was hard to tell new decidious growth from old fire-damaged growth. Here and there some char showed on the trunks of the old trees, but that seems to have become less notidceable with time–or maybe it was just that there were so many bare trees now.
Got to walk with brown leaves–including tiny mountain oak leaves–beneath my feet. Been a while since I walked through autumn leaf litter. Doing so always bring back being 10 or 15 years old, kicking through dry leaves on my way to school. Only up here there were dry pine needles as well, and huge pine cones, neither of which were part of my childhood landscape.
At one point, a stand of bare trees were all bent sideways, away from the trail, probably by ice, but it made them all look like dancers, stretching together.
Toward the end of the hike, there’s a stand of young post-fire aspen trees–taller than me now, though when I first saw them a couple years ago I could look down on them and their soft green leaves. Yesterday the aspens were bare, slender, and smooth silver gray–new minted, a contrast to the more tarnished and battered silver of the few surviving older aspens.