Keystone species

High above most everything else on Big Mountain, marking the treeline where dense forest becomes open sky, sit dozens of tall pines with what appears to be mesh bags covering their pine cones.

These trees are whitebark pines and the bags are actually protective cages. The work is part of a conservation effort to save the keystone species, making the resort the first Whitebark Pine Friendly Ski Area designated by the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation.

WPEF is a nonprofit that focuses on conserving and restoring whitebark pines through education, management and research.

“It’s a great thing, it’s a great cooperation between the forest service and the mountain and WPEF,” said Melissa Jenkins, a silviculturist for Flathead National Forest.

Jenkins said these pines once covered 13 percent of the forest but have died off dramatically as a result of a non-native fungal disease called white pine blister rust, which took hold in the area in the 1960s. Attacks by mountain pine beetles and climate change have also contributed to the trees’ decline, she said. Trees infected with blister rust are distinguished by their orange needles and swollen stems and branches.

Whitebark pines play an important role in their surrounding ecosystem, regulating snowmelt runoff, reducing soil erosion by growing early after wildfire has charred the land and providing a fatty, high energy food source in its seeds for about 100 different species. The trees’ only method of seed dispersal is the Clark’s nutcracker, which opens the cones, takes the seeds and buries them in caches in the ground.

While more than 90 percent of the whitebark pines on Big Mountain have died off, some trees have shown signs of rust resistance, standing tall while others around them succumb to disease. The cages protect the cones until the seeds inside are ripe in mid-September. The seeds will then be used to grow seedlings for outplanting, generally in recent wildfire areas.

Since it takes a whitebark pine between 50 and 70 years to mature and produce cones, the Forest Service has sped up the process, selecting trees, exposing them to rust to see if they’re resistant to the disease and, if they are, putting the resistant mother trees into seed orchards. The full process for a seed to be planted takes about three years.

Whitebark pines on Big Mountain were the first to see conservation efforts, which started back in 1994, said Karl Anderson, silviculture specialist of Flathead National Forest. Cages have been used to protect cones since 2002.

The whitebark pines on Big Mountain are one of 14 similar sites in Flathead National Forest. The Forest Service has been running an active planting program for the last five years, planting new whitebarks in about 125 acres of the forest each year. This year, 18 trees had their cones protected on Big Mountain.

“Getting them back out on the ground and getting those trees to eventually produce seed is very important to maintaining the species,” Anderson said.

The cages will be opened Sept. 17 during the annual WPEF meeting, held this year in Whitefish. Along with a field trip to the protected trees, there will be a small ceremony to present WMR with its certification.

“It’s going to be a culmination of a lot of hard work and we’re very proud to have worked with Whitefish Mountain Resort,” Anderson said.