 So today, the title of his presentation is Late Quaternary Environments of Eastern Oregon, Forest, and Fire History of Blue Mountains. Please welcome Peter Merringer. Thank you. I've been in for surprises since I came here this morning. Begin with, I took the wrong turn off the freeway and ended up down the road in Cove. And I couldn't find your lab. But I finally made it here. And then when I got here, they said, oh, you're going to be taped today, and here's your microphone. And so, but having recently spent some time, a long time, actually, many, many months in China, I've come to accept the fact that we're just all so much flotsam on life's river. So I'll float along with it. And we'll see what happens. I like to do several things today. It's always every time you start to put one of these lectures together, you say, well, what should I do this time? Because I've already done what I did last time. And so I thought today that we'd start out by talking about some of the perspectives on changes through time. What do we know about them? And what do they look like in the interior northwest for the last 20,000 years or so? Then I like to point out, in the process of doing that, that the past is the key to the present. If we want to understand the present ecosystems, we need to know their history. And I hope good examples of that. And then I'd like to say just a little bit about some of the methods that are used. I have a few slides of chlorine and this sort of thing to get you in the spirit. And then, I guess, gee, we're in the Northwest. So there's no way I can talk about records of the past vegetation in the Northwest unless we first say something about volcanic ashes, tephra, because they're so important in dating our sites. And then I think we'll go to the Steens Mountains. Steens Mountains is a place I've worked for many years. Because I like to go there, I always manage to find something to do that takes me there. And so I'd just like to say a few words about some of the work there. And Take Western Juniper is an example. And then we want to look at the upper and lower limits of Western Juniper over the whole scene. Then I would like to come back to a place called Lost Lake, which some of you may know. It's not so far from here. It's in the Blue Mountains and about 30 miles from Dale. Do you all know where that is? You're all Oregonians. You must. And you get there on the road to Olive Lake as though you were going over from near Yuccaia to Granite in that area. And if you've driven down that road, how many of you have driven down that road? Not a lot of you. You notice that as you drive along towards Olive Lake, there's a ridge up on your right-hand side. And every once in a while, that ridge has a circ in it where I sat there during, oh, I don't know, 20,000 to maybe 15,000 years ago. And then beneath those circs are some moraines. So there are a couple of lakes in there that are down in the mixed conifer forest now. And behind those moraines are a couple of lakes. And one of these is Jump Off Joe Lake. And the other one is Lost Lake. That's the one I'll say something about. And so the way I thought I'd do this is I have some overheads to start out with. And then I have some slides to mix in with them. So when we start to show slides, I'll move this out of the way. And then each time I'll push it back again and get everything focused up. I think it'll work fine. And then I can't move very much because I'm being taped. And so normally I'm a roamer. But with the crowd in here, I couldn't roam anyway. So if I look like I'm going to sleep, I'm not. I'm just not moving. Let's see. How do we start out? First of all, when we ask, well, what do we know about the history of the quaternary vegetation of Oregon? And you look up at this map and you have to say, oh my gosh, not very much. Each of those circles is a site where we know something. And excuse me. I'm going to have to turn my back to you to find myself on the map. And if we look down in southeastern Oregon right here, 37, 33, and 31 on the map, that's all in the Steens Mountains area. That's work that I've done at Fish Lake, at Wild Horse Lake, and that my students and I have done at Diamond Pond. OK. And then there's in the Sylvie's Valley, there's a little bit of a record. Doesn't go back very far and it's not in very good detail from a place called Cratic Meadows. And we come north from there and this is Lost Lake, a place I want to talk about a little today in the blues. And then this is Twin Lakes. How many of you know Twin Lakes in the Willawas? It's on the south side, not far from Duck Lake. I think Duck Lake's pretty well known because it has some unusual aquatic plants, as I understand it. So we're not far from Duck Lake. And I just had a student Abigail Beck just finished up a master's thesis looking at the pollen algae and from the last, oh, about 4,000 years from cores from Twin Lakes. So gosh, that's not very much, is it? Now, and then right now I'm in the process of putting together a report for Lost Lake in, again, not far away here in the blues. And that isn't finished yet, but there will be a report. It's actually supported as a challenge grant out of the John Day office. And then, as a matter of fact, all of this work was started about 10 years ago by archaeologists who were in the Pendleton office or in Baker. Guy Martin's here. He was involved in that. And we got cores with a little bit of help from the Forest Service. And then that helped kind of fell away. And then someone got interested again and said, well, would you go back to Lost Lake and see what else you can find out? I said, oh, sure. Of course. And so we have. Well, as you can see, that's really not very much. I mean, Eastern Oregon is hardly known at all. And so that's about all we can talk about. And the work at Lost Lake is still in progress, but it's coming along very well. Well, I like to say, I think I'll just stick with the overheads here for a minute and point out, no, I better not. I better go to the slides. Something's coming up here that I need the slides for. So if I turn this off, yeah. OK, we're going to begin to look at the records of vegetation history. And of course, vegetation is tied to climate and many other things as well. But when we begin to look at the record, what we see is that we have biotic responses. And I think of the record and say, well, just go back 20,000 years, just a short time. And look at the vegetation for this region, for the interior Northwest. And what we find is that the vegetation is responding to short, sharp climatic changes. One of the things we're always keeping in mind when we think about the Pleistocene is that I don't know what you learned about the ice ages when you went to school. But I know what I learned in my geomorphology class when I was a freshman a long time ago. And there's that. There were four ice ages. And they were always drawn like this, big loops. Well, what we've come to understand is there's certainly on four, maybe there's 40, but there aren't four. And they don't come like this. They come in short, sharp changes, changes in state from one climatic regime to another. So this is how we have to view the climatic record. Then, of course, along with that, we have glaciers, very important in the interior Northwest, of course. And then beyond the glaciers, other things we have to remember is that there's changes in the area of where there was water and where there wasn't water. So as you know, one of the greatest floods in all of the geologic record, well, almost all of the geologic record occur not far north of you here in central Washington when a dam for a proglacial lake, glacial lake Missoula broke. And the flood came through central Washington. Also to the south of us, not very far, in the northern Great Basin in Washington, places like Fort Rock and Catlow Valley and Alvord Valley, there were, and Warner Valley, there were great places to see in the lake. So those are important. And then the last thing for the Pacific Northwest interior that we have to keep in mind are volcanic activities. Anyone who drives the highway south from Bend has to be impressed with the kinds of trees that are occurring on the pumice, or if you drive up into, or the kinds that aren't. And if you drive up into Crayer Lake itself, you see there are areas of pumice desert completely occupied by a lodgepole pine, for example. So you might just think, well, how much, for a minute, how much tephra volcanic ash fell on the Blue Mountains in various places? And what influence did that have on the forest history since? And what influence has the continuous change in the volcanic soils had? It would be nice to be able to look at a site, for example, in the Blue Mountains where the ash fall was incredibly heavy. I can't tell you what the primary deposit was, but it has to be in 20 centimeters, 30 centimeters, something like that. Perhaps it's huge. And what was the vegetation before that fell and what was it after? And so it was an interesting thing to look at in your core as you look up to the point just before a volcanic ash fell and then afterwards. OK, so there are those things. Now, if we take this just a period at a time, what we can say about the interior Northwest, and I think all the records show there's not much argument about it, is there are not many forests to be had. Oh, there's trees to be had, but the high mountains are covered with glaciers, the valleys and intermediate areas are covered primarily by cold steppe. And the climate is a cold continental climate. Now somewhere in the neighborhood or 12,000 or 13,000 years ago, that changes. And we see that we have a period we call the late glacial. So let's say from 10,000 to 12,500, something like that. When we began to see some interesting things happening, the first thing is that we have an initial treeless interlude still, sagebrush and grass, steppe, predominate shrubs. And then we begin to see, this would be throughout the West, vegetation with a very much of an alpine character. Let me explain what I mean with that by that. And then referring to here is say if we were to look at the pollen record from one of these late glacial sites from the Bitterroot mountains or from the Blue Mountains or from wherever. What we would see is a combination of pollen types, sometimes with seeds or macrofossils to go with it, a combination that we'll never see again. It just isn't there again like that. So it's this transition between the full glacial and the late glacial and then into the Holocene that it doesn't come back again. And when we look at the pollen records, it looks something like this. We get a lot of things. You say, oh, well, that's no problem. They all grow here now. Well, some do and some don't. But the point is they're in abundance and they're common. And then we just don't see this combination again. And they do have kind of an alpine character, lots of sagebrush, of course, bistords, polymoniums, areogams, oxyria, which is truly Arctic, konegia, which is Arctic. And shepherdia canadensis is really an interesting one because you say, oh, yeah, shepherdia canadensis, I know it is understory. Oh, the ponderosa in the bitter roots or wherever you know, shepherdia canadensis from. But we hardly find it in our Holocene pollen records. And in the late glacial, it's really rather common. And these first communities to invade areas that were glaciated. And this not only occurs in the mountains of the interior Northwest, but it occurs all the way north through Alaska and Canada as well. It's a kind of plant that was very, very successful on ground recently occupied by ice. And then along with that comes some interesting things. Of course, if you have a lot of rocky open country, you'd expect salaginellas to be more abundant. And in places where salaginella salaginoides is an Arctic species, it does occur in the high mountains south in the US. It's not that common. It's usually on limestone and then lots of botricium, which again kind of gives you this botricium, the little fern that you'd find under the mountain hemlocks around Crater Lake, for example. And then, of course, Juniperus is one of the first shrubs we see. And that's probably Juniperus communus. And then, finally, our first tree to invade is usually spruce. So this happens almost everywhere. And then we don't see this kind of combination again after that. Well, now in the whole scene, that is the last 10,000 years, we need to think of some other things as well. One of these is that we still have these short, sharp climatic changes. And I know that sometimes it's easy to think of the whole of scene because it's been traditional to think of the whole of scene as being divided in three parts with a mid-whole of scene, warm, dry period. But it really doesn't work that way. There's as much variation within what people have called the altothermal period in the mid-whole of scene as there is throughout as there is in any other period. So again, we have these short, sharp environmental shifts and due to climate. And when we see those, we see that right along with them, and sometimes our evidence for them, are these shifts in evidence for shifts in vegetation. And we also know that there is no clear way to look at old areas large as even eastern Oregon and say, well, all of these changes that we would see in a pollen record or in macrophosal record from pack rat middens are going to occur at the same time everywhere. It depends on what's changing and where you are on the landscape. So each site is also peculiar. And last, the recent appearance of familiar associations. If I were to just have you all think of a vegetation type, a forest type somewhere, that you think of as having deep roots and having to have been in place for a long time. This is in the interior. Would something come to mind for you? The sagebrush community forever, and they're with us now. Yeah, sure. And that's the evidence for that is clear. Yeah, anything. How about a forest community? Do you think of these as all being ephemeral, as species of the community is varying through time? Ponderosa. Ponderosa. Yeah, some sort of ponderosa. Some sort of ponderosa. And that's something that a lot of people would come up with. And you know, it's really interesting, because when we look back on our fossil records, what we have less evidence for, and this is throughout the West, not just in the Northwest, but we have the least evidence for in our fossil record is ponderosa. And so I think all I'm trying to do is get you to think that maybe the familiar associations of today didn't come that way. That they came one species at a time. And of course, we see them within a lifetime. In that lifetime, there's just a frame in a movie. And the vegetation units are much more ephemeral than that. Now let me take a couple of examples to illustrate this. And one will make perfect sense to you. And I hope the second one doesn't. We'll be wasting my time. Here's the first one. If we were to take, just go to the south here a little ways into the northern Great Basin, into the Great Basin, rather. And take a look at the history of Pinus monofila, the single needle pinion pine. And we know quite a bit about it. And that's why I can make a map like this. It's easy to do. You look up all the fossil sites, mind, there must be 500 pack radmins that have pinion pines in them, and they're dated. So there's good data. And we can say, for example, that we know that there were no pinion pines in northern Nevada during the last Ice Age, at least no one's ever found one. But once we get to southern Nevada, down into where it's desert today, we find these pygmy forests, pinion juniper forests. And so that you can think of single needle pinion as spending the Ice Age somewhere south of southern Nevada. And then, as we start to follow its move northward, this is all expected, isn't it? It's filling its range slowly. But what's really interesting is that it has didn't finally get to its northeastern limit until 400 years ago. And it didn't really approach its modern limit until after 2,000 years ago. You know, it also goes right over here into the city of rocks in southern Idaho near the Maraft River Mountains. And we collected pack-rat middens there last summer to try and figure out when they'd arrive. And I haven't done that work yet, so I can't tell you. But is it going to be 400? No, I expect to be surprised and have to change part of this map when we really do find out because there's no way to tell. I could have taken a leap and been there for a much longer time. But anyway, the notion that's clear here from looking at the fossil record is that we have this progress northward to fill its present range. And that present range has only been filled rather recently. So if we think of the Pinion Juniper woodlands, this area of Nevada, you can see that they're very short-lived. The Juniper, on the other hand, Utah Juniper probably was there throughout the Pleistocene by itself without its pinions. So that community is new, relatively, in its northern extent. Now, can I have the next slide just for a minute? Here's another one that's been really interesting to me. Someone mentioned Ponderosa. And I've been really interested in this community. Up in northern Idaho, we have a combination of trees that look like they belong more over on the coast. It's a maritime forest in northern Idaho, along with particularly Western hemlock, anthuya, and other species as well. But those are the two main ones. And what else did I put up there? All the things that go with it, Abys Grandis and taxes. And of course, Doug Furrer is always there. And the white pine. Well, we've had an opportunity to do some work over the last few years in a place. Let me go back to here again, in a place called Hager Pond. And that's right here. Oops, I can't find myself upside down. Right about here. And it's a very interesting story. What we see here is the present on this map. That's our study site, plus other sites in the northwest. And what we see here is not the story that we saw from Pinion Pine. It goes from south to north and fills up its area. But what we see is something that is really different. And it works like this. This, the shaded part of this overhead is the outside limits of the present. You OK? Could have scared you, you know. Lecture's heating up. So this is the outside limits. And there's one on here that I have discovered doesn't belong. Part of this distribution is not correct that it may confuse. There's little patch down here. This is from Little's map. And it turns out that what I've been able to find out, that really doesn't exist. So really the southern limit of Western Hemlock is probably about the north fork of the Clearwater. Well, in any case, this is the present distribution. And Henry P. Hansen, a pioneering paleontologist from Oregon State University. And let's see, he died, I don't know, several years ago. But back in the 30s, he had tested a lot of sites and did a lot of initial pollen work in the Pacific Northwest, including some work up near Anthony Lakes, as a matter of fact. Well, he looked at this place called Hager Pond. Let's get back to where we are here. Yeah, a place called Hager Pond. And he pointed out in the 1930s that Western Hemlock there was only a couple of thousand years old. Well, Dick Mack from Washington State University looked at the same place in the 1970s and said, gee, this is only just like Henry Hansen said. This is part of the moist maritime forest. This is a new species recently, just the last couple of thousand years. And thought that this represented a climatic change that finally made it possible for this forest to come together with all of its parts. Let me show you another diagram you can take. Oh, let me, while I have this up here, let me go tell you the story, then I'll show you the evidence for the story. That'll work. If we look at the western part of the distribution of Western Hemlock, we see that it is south of the ice sheet here 12,000 years ago. This line is the ice sheet. So there's not much forest here. But once the ice sheet leaves, we see that the Western Hemlock moves northward, goes on up to Alaska, and into this area by 7,000 years ago. The next place we see it is over on this side in the mountains again. And we see that by 4,000 years ago here, 4,500 years ago here. And then we see it here, and here, and here about 2,000, 2,500 years ago. What's happened is it didn't move north from some refugium in the south. It moved from the coast north, jumped over, and then to the mountains, and then moved back south again. Without the fossil record, you'd have no way of knowing that. As a matter of fact, as many of you will probably know, there are papers written on the biogeography of this forest, which places in refugiums to the south. Well, how do we get to that data? One of the ways we got to that, which is really kind of interesting, is to use a couple of techniques that we couldn't have used a few years ago. And one of them is to establish a deposition rate with radiocarbon dates so that we can tell how many years we're dealing with. And once we have that deposition rate, if we have a way to tell how many pollen grains are in a sample, and that's done by introducing a tracer, so we introduce a known number of exotic, like a podium spore is into a sample, then you can compare everything or one thing to that. Well, so what this diagram is is not your typical percentage pollen diagram, but it's actually a diagram that shows the pollen grains per centimeter square per year. Now, another thing has come along that's made it possible to do a little more detailed work, and that is a method of radiocarbon dating called accelerator dating, in which case when we need to, we can look at a sample of a single needle, say 0.005 grams, and a single charred needle is enough for a radiocarbon date. Well, if a single charred needle is enough for a radiocarbon date, maybe some other small things are too. And one of these things that's small is a pollen grain. And so with my colleague, Peter Vanduwater, at the University of Arizona, who had all of the facilities in a micro manipulator, we actually picked pollen grains out of this sample at this level. So here you can see that Western hemlocks are approaching from somewhere. You can just pick up their first pollen, and then just about at the point where it starts to increase, we thought, oh, we'll have enough that if anyone is crazy enough to sit there for two weeks and pick out pollen grains, we can actually date the pollen that's blowing into the site before the plant arrives. So here's our story. And here it is, 2,000 plus or minus years ago. And we have sufficient pollen. And then here's our first macro fossil from that core, one single needle of Western hemlock. And it's about 1,500 years old. So with these kinds of data, you can start to build up the history of particular species and how they're associated with particular communities. OK, do you have any questions before I go on? Well, so hopefully out of some of what we've done now, you'll get the notion that the past is the key to the present. I like to go on and just talk a little bit about the record from the Steens Mountains and then go to the Blue Mountains. I think I'll take this rather rapidly so we can and maybe just talk about one aspect of the Steens. And before I do that, just a few general things that probably are important to understand. And one is that if we go to Coral Lake, this is a scabland lake in South Central Washington left in the path of the great scabland flood, which plucked out the basalt and sent it on down the Columbia or wherever. And one of the things that people ask a lot, so I thought I'd just cover it before you ask, how do you sample the top of a lake? Because, you know, they're soft. We do it a couple of ways. And what we've done here at Blue Lake and I'm sorry, at Lost Lake near Dale and at Twin Lakes in the Walla was actually to freeze the top of the lake. So that if you have questions about changes over historic fires, historic time or a fire that, say, burned in 1930, can you pick it up in your record and therefore have a date? And I just wanted to show you a little bit of how that's done. You know, the tops of lakes are so soft that if you just leave them in a core, they'll flow out the end. And we found this really important in studying the history of recent volcanic eruptions, for example. This is just a box, as you can see, into which dry ice is being put and broken up. And into that box also goes alcohol and a twist of lemon. And then after that, you stick it down in the lake, the bottom of the lake, and into the water column part into the sediment so that you're in the mudwater interface. And then you pull it up in about a half hour, and it comes out like this. So you have your historic period frozen. And then what you can do is just take this, put some warm water inside, saving the alcohol and the dry ice that's still left, and put a little warm water inside, and it just breaks off the outside. Then you can put that in with some more dry ice, take it back to the lab, clean it up a bit, put it on a bandsaw, and cut out your half-centimeter slices or whatever you want. And you have your historic period recorded. And I need to tell you this because I'm going to show you a diagram in just a little bit from up here in the blues that has a 1986 fire recorded in it as an individual event. And what you see here is this is a frozen section. And here's the mudwater interface is right there. There's just ice. And then this is the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. This is well preserved to give you a notion how that's done. OK, so that's one aspect that's important. And of course, in the Pacific Northwest, dealing with volcanic ashes is very important. These are some eruptions of Mount St. Helens. I should point out that we have Mount St. Helens ash in both of the lakes in the blues, both Lost Lake and Twin Lakes. And of course, the May 18 eruption, you notice that each one of these eruptions has a different pattern of distribution. So we don't find all of them in every core. But something like Mount Mazama or Glacier Peak, let me just go to that map, has a much wider distribution. So we find them in most of our cores. This is, these are just a few of the eruptions that are very commonly found in the interior Northwest. And there are others. There are some now that are coming from the Oregon Cascades. We have one of those in the Wallahs that hasn't even been reported outside the Cascades before. And these are identified by age, by mineral sweets, and by the chemistry of the glass, which varies from tephra to tephra. And those are just a few of them that we look for. Glacier Peak in the smaller distribution and Mount Mazama in the much larger distribution, all the way to Saskatchewan, down to central Nevada, over into discordous site in Northwestern Utah. You can see Great Salt Lake. They're just north of Great Salt Lake that has a couple centimeters of Mazama ash in it. So it is spread, and of course, up into Saskatchewan and Canada, British Columbia and Alberta. And this is an example of how one of these ashes looks in a core. You can also see something goes with that tephra in this case. I've used the term tephra as just another term for volcanic ash. It's the proper term. And you can see there's evidence for something else here. There's a center of a conifer cone and some broken wood, which suggests there was a fire. And this is Mazama ash from Clearover and the Bitterroot Mountains. This is from Prater Lake, seven centimeters of it, much more than that in the Blue Mountains. And here is a core, which you can probably see there's some ash right there. And it's very much older. This is also from the, this focus isn't working here. So if it doesn't seem in focus, I can't do anything about it from here. This is from Glacier Peak. And of course, there are at least two episodes of eruptions from Glacier Peak. So these are very important. Of course, we look for these in all the cores. And fortunately, there was a nice tephra record out of the Blue Mountains. That's part of its data now, including, as a matter of fact, the furthest extent of tephra from Newbury volcano. So yeah, there's more to come from the blues. This is some of the ways we are able to get cores. This happens to be in a very deep lake. Deep, in this case, is 60 feet or so. And we put our raft out before it froze. And then we let it freeze. Then go out and work off the raft. Just makes a better platform. Or if you're sure the ice will hold up under all the pressure of coring, you can just do it on the ice. And sometimes that's problematic. So there's a place that we're totally serious about. We like to put our raft out in the fall and then let it freeze in. OK. And then some people say, well, how do you know where to core a lake? And I like to tell them we use a pointer. This is my old dog, Jezebel, who has been dead for many years. But she loved to go coring. She was really a coring dog. And sometimes things really get going tough. We actually have a little three-horse, five-horsepower engine here that will raise and lower weights. In this case, where you can actually see that's well casing. It's schedule 45-inch diameter pipe. It's pretty strong. And so we're driving that as casing after we've already taken a core. Then we'll case it. In this case, to get through Mazzama ash, it's over five meters of ash. You can imagine that from Mount Mazzama. That's washed into some of the lakes in Central Washington. And here in the Blue Mountains at Lost Lake, near Dale, we have over four meters that washed into that depression. And we couldn't get through it, as a matter of fact, because we didn't bring our engine on our steel casing along. And we can actually drop a 200-pound weight on that casing. Or you can use a vibrating rod, like you would use in cement. That works sometimes, too. OK, so just a little background. Well, here we are on the Steens Mountains. And I guess probably the most interesting thing about the Steens Mountains was the opportunity to combine pollen and pack ratmidden evidence together. And one of the places that this could be done was in a place called Diamond Craters. How many of you have been to Diamond Craters? Steens, a lot of you, so you know it. Well, there's one pond there in Diamond Craters called Diamond Pond. Here we are, here's Southeastern Oregon, the Steens Mountains here, a couple of lakes, Wild Horse Lake and Fish Lake. And then here's Diamond Craters. And I just want to talk about Diamond Craters and some of the evidence for vegetation change there, particularly in reference to Western Juniper. Now, this is the vegetation of the Steens Mountains today, as you can see. And most of you probably already know. There's except for a few white fir, white fir, grand fir, hybrids, or whatever they are. On the west side, in a couple of canyons, and juniper, there are really no coniferous trees there. Some ponderoses were planted some time ago and a few still survive, not many. And one of the questions we went there with was, well, how long has this been the case? Why are there no forests in the Steens? And the answer we came up with, there are no forests in the Steens because there weren't any forests in the Steens. After the last ice age, we have cores that go back and fish lake to 13,000 years ago. As soon as the ice retreats from that basin, we have sagebrush and grass, and it stays that way with some fluctuations for 13,000 years. So all we do is see the variation in step. Then, so that was really the main question we went there with, well, in the process of doing other work, we learned much more about it. Diamond pond is at much lower elevation. At these lower elevations, there are some lava tubes. And in these lava tubes are pack rat middens. And the pack rat midden record here goes back, oh, not very far. The work we've done, it's only 4,000 or 5,000 years. Over in the Catlow Valley, it's a little longer than that. But we've really been interested in juniper because juniper has been everybody's interest in eastern Washington, I'm sorry, eastern Oregon, for as long as I can remember. And you all know the story about how, if it's not today's story, it was yesterday's story, about how junipers were, how the modern invasion was unnatural. And we wanted to look back and say, see, well, is that really the case? Have junipers expanded and contracted before? Or is this really unusual? And we did that, both using pack rat middens and the pollen records from Diamond Pond. Here's our culprit right here. I could like these trees myself, but I know there are people who don't. And here's Diamond Craters. And I think maybe this is a little small to show up here. But here's Diamond Pond. And then this is an attempt to put some vegetation in here. This is shedscale. Most everything else in here is sagebrush. And then there are little pieces of juniper here and there. And then every one of those localities that you see is every number up here, 9 through 14 from this locality, for example, is an individually dated pack rat midden that we've been able to look at the record in. And along with those pack rat middens, we have this Diamond Pond, which is a mar. And that's just an eruption crater where the magma has contacted the water table. And then this gas builds up from that. And there's an explosion. Fort Brock, I think, is the best example in Oregon. This is a small one. It has about 50 feet of sediment in it. And it looks something like that. It varies from year to year a little, but not much. And as you can see, can you sharpen that a little bit? As we look at the vegetation around here, there's a little bit of fragmities on that side. And then this is mainly cattail. In fact, everything is mainly cattail this year. But there's also scurpus in here, too. I just can't see it right now because the cattail is so tall. And then as soon as you leave that, you're right into Shadscale Desert. Well, it's kind of interesting that a former student of mine, Peter Weigand, worked here for his PhD. And he did for that 15, almost 50 feet of core, the macrofossils, the sediments, the pollen, the algae, everything he could come up with. And it turns out that there's a story here of past climatic change. And that story is told in the macrofossils of the aquatic plants, the plants that grew around the outside, the emerging aquatic plants as well, and also in the sediments in the pollen and in the algae. And it turns out that this place has had quite a history of being shallow and then deep and shallow and then deep. And of course, every time it changes its depth by any great amount, say it got shallower, that rim of vegetation around the edge comes closer to the middle. And we eliminate some of the species that would grow as aquatic plants. Potomagetan, rupia, myriophyllum, those sorts of things. So there's a seed record of these. So we've been able to, I think, reconstruct, or Peter did, a pretty good job. He did a pretty good job of reconstructing the way that pond has looked through the past, back and forth like this, smaller and larger diameter, and then, of course, up and down at the same time. And so given that, the fact that we have those cores, now with that as a basis, we can start to look at that juniper record. Here we are, coring. These are very, as you can see, it's a very small pond. And if we look today at the area around Diamond Pond, there are a few junipers, and none of them are very old. And, well, none of them. Most of them are not very old. Most of them are from recent invasion. But we can go out into an area like this in which there are no junipers within the home range of a packrat and crawl into the caves. And from those caves find packrat middens that actually date to, this doesn't show up because of the lights, but there's a lava flow right here that has one of those lava tubes in it that is full of packrat middens. And those packrat middens are of different ages, and they're dominated sometimes by junipers and sometimes not. And if we put them all together, we see a record that looks like this. The bottom is all the radiocarbon dates plotted as though everything under this curve is three standard deviations. So it's a probability of 99 points, something that radiocarbon date falls within that space along the bottom of the line. And then the height here tells you what the plus or minus was on the date, how good the dating was. But all of the curves actually cover the same area. Now, if you add all the area under all the curves, you see that diamond craters in the wood rat middens, we get a record that looks like that. And these are wood rat middens with juniper. And so that juniper is fluctuated in the past. It has a chronology. We can see when it was there and when it was abundant, and perhaps when it wasn't. But of course that's not enough. You could have just missed some packrat middens. So we then can compare this to the continuous record in diamond pond and see that we have the same story. Another thing that is really interesting is that we can't find junipers in southeastern Oregon that is Western juniper that is more than 4,000, 4,500 years old. I've come to think that maybe they're just not here. And that the juniper, quote unquote, invasion didn't start in historic time. It started about 5,000 years ago. But that's another story. Let me show you the comparison here. I just did this again using tree ring corrected dates. It spreads it out just a little bit. You see the same thing. So there's another story here as well. When we look at the pollen record, we can see several things. One, remember in that last diagram I showed you, there were lots of juniper remains in this period around 4,000 to 2,000 years ago. There were lots of pack rat middens dating from that age. And so we can look at the pollen record and add something to that. We take the grass sagebrush ratio. So there'd be increasing grass as we go this direction towards me is sagebrush. In fact, in this period between 2,000 and 4,000 years ago, when the junipers seem to be more abundant than they are today, that it's also a period when grass is more abundant than sagebrush, another thing we can do is look at the charcoal pollen ratio. Now you can imagine it's just a tool that seems to work many times, is that if we look at the charcoal, we actually, when we are looking at pollen in our slides, we can count charcoal fragments. And if there are many charcoal fragments in relation to pollen, that indicates, well, first of all, there's more charcoal fragments. And they look like there are more in relation to pollen because if either the pollen rain is constant and there's just more charcoal, or actually you've destroyed part of the vegetation in a fire. So we also see that more fires go with that same period. So there are some connections here. So that's the story of Western juniper. OK. And you see it here with the pack rat middens with the juniper, the sum of all the dates in the second line and the top line are the percentages. Am I running out of time here? I'm sorry, I can't see the clock. Does everyone have to leave here? Yeah, you've got 10 minutes. Yeah, a number of people will have to leave in about 10 minutes. In 10 minutes, it's time I got to the Blue Mountains. I'm going to leave the rest of Eastern Oregon go. Yes, just let me go on through here. Fish Lake, of course, more records, more that you don't. OK. Well, here we are at Lost Lake. And we caught Lost Lake in 1987. In 1986, there was a hell of a fire there, I'll tell you. And it swept up the canyon. And it was a tough destroying fire. If you go there today, the mineral soil is black and orange and in many places and ashy. And it's still that way. So it was a very hot fire over part of the area. Now, we were able to get cores from Lost Lake that went back to Mount Mazama. Because we didn't have our really heavy duty equipment with us when we went there. And we got into Mazama something more than four meters of tephra. And we just couldn't get through what we had. So the record goes back until about the time of Mount Mazama. Now, a couple of things you can see here are the depths of some of the dates, the material dated. And you notice in some cases, we actually dated where there was evidence for fire. So it's on dispersed charcoal. In other cases, we actually dated individual needles or cone scales or something like that. And here's a case where we have an alnus twig, a pineus contorted needle. What else do we have here? And more pineus contorted needle. I think we had two or three here and two or three here. And so we could actually pull out an individual charred needle and date it, but you gave us a date on the needle and on a fire. So first of all, we had to establish the dating. The next thing was that when we looked into the cores, we noticed that there were distinct bands of charcoal. And the distinct bands of charcoal, fortunately, had within them lots of macrofossils that preserved very well because they were charred. And also more sand and silt. So just let me show you. There were in some, I think, 16 bands. Now, what you see here are the thicknesses of these. How thick was this band of charcoal in the core? And then the next thing is the radiocarbon age. And then if we calibrate that with the tree ring correction curve, these are the actual years ago in actual ages. There's a difference between real years and radiocarbon years. And there's about 800 years difference at the time of Mzama Ash. So that's how it would look. And a couple of things that are interesting here. As we looked at the macrofossils, throughout this record very little changed. The site today is in that mixed forest with lots of larch, dug fir with lodgepole pine. And those are really the important species there. And if you look at this, oh, and grand fir, or grand fir con color, or something like that. So you can see that in each of those, it looks like the forest, in terms of what's ending up as macrofossils in that record, is about the same. And it has been since the time of Mzama, except for one thing. Within the forest, at the elevation of the lake, the subalpine fir are just a little bit higher up in the CERC. The lake is Moraine Dam. And there's no ponderosa pine at the site. Now, in an area that was burned in 86, which faces more to the west, there are a few ponderosa pine seedlings. But that's it. And it's kind of interesting. When we look at this very bottom layer, if I just draw your attention to this one, this is down in Mzama ash. And it's 20 centimeters thick. Can you imagine a 20 centimeter thick band of charcoal mixed in with redeposited Mzama ash? And then when we look at the macrofossils, there's dug fir, larch, grand fir, I guess. It looks like it from the needle cross sections. Some alpine fir, different needle cross sections. Lodge pole pine and ponderosa pine. So we actually have a fascicle of ponderosa where it doesn't grow today. That part of the record is kind of interesting. After that, I haven't looked at these levels yet. After that, we don't see it again. We also don't see it any indication of a large pollen grain that would be likely ponderosa ever being more abundant than it is in the modern pollen rain. And of course, it blows all over, so we do get a little. So we have a macrofossil record that's coming along fairly well, which suggests that the actual major species in that forest haven't changed that much since the fall of Mzama. What we don't have is a sample that would take us back 1,000 years or so before Mzama that would help understand that situation a little better. By using the radiocarbon dates and depth and a fourth order polynomial, we put together a deposition rate curve that looks something like this in each triangle as a pollen sample, a sample where we would count charcoal, pollen, algae, and a few other things. For example, say, particular kinds of leaf hairs of plants. Newphar, pondlidly, has a couple of leaf hairs that are very distinctive. So even if you don't have seeds or pollen, you know it's there because these hairs come through. Sclerids, Newphar are very distinctive. So this is the record we have so far for Lost Lake. And you can see most of the samples are near the top because this work that we've been doing in the last year and a half is supported by, as I mentioned earlier, through the office at John Day on a challenge grant. And we just didn't have enough support to go any further than that. But that'll give you an idea of the sampling. Now, I don't want to say there's no change in the forest because there is. But the major species aren't changing. So I want to say a few words about fire. You saw that we had particular layers that would indicate fires, probably dust-destroying fires, severe fires, so that after the fires, we'd have charcoal washed in maybe in the spring freshets. And when we put our charcoal data, this is again Lost Lake, and look at it in terms of charcoal per centimeter square per year, which we can do because we have the deposition rate curve, and we need that. So once you establish that, and then what we can see is that there's a period in here. Here's time is over on the left-hand side. That's your right-hand side, sorry, is on the right-hand side, and depth is on the left-hand side. So we look at that period between 2,000 and 3,400 years ago, and looking here, you can see that in this curve is for pollen, I'm sorry, charcoal that's 25 to 50 microns. This curve is for charcoal that is 50 to 100 microns, and this is for charcoal that is more than 100 microns. So it comes in different sizes, and we keep track of it that way. And then this is the sum of all charcoal. And what we see is that this is what that very hot fire in 1986 looked like. It shows up in our records, and that's because we froze the top of the lake, and we're able to cut it very thinly. And there's what it looks like. If we go back in time, what we see is that back here between 2,000 and about 3,400 years ago, that there were many times, you can see them all here, where there was a superabundance of charcoal. Earlier on I mentioned that sometimes we use a charcoal pollen ratio to look at that situation, and here's the charcoal pollen ratio. So as it turns out, by sampling fairly closely, we're able to establish the number of large fires. And where we haven't sampled closely enough in the bottom of this record, there's not much you can say, because it's just hit and miss. So it requires some very close interval sampling to be able to get a record like we have in the upper half there. Let's see. Fire. Another thing that's another way to look at this is to look at the weight loss on ignition. If we take continuous samples down our core, and we dry those at 105 degrees centigrade to their actual drive, cry them for a couple of days, and then burn them in a furnace at 550, 600 degrees centigrade, we lose the organic carbon. And it's weight loss on ignition. It's just a quick method, and a fairly good method of determining how much organic carbon is in the sample. If we were in a limestone area, we're working with marls, then we'd weigh that and then have to burn it again at 950 degrees C, and that would be carbonate carbon. It's carbon that's tied up in carbonates. And so the organic weight loss from these samples give us a percent organic carbon, give us another measure of fires. As you can see, here is a tephra that we're going to take a tephra. They were on the last illustration as well. I just stayed with the charcoal on that one. Here's a tephra layer. Here's Mount Mazama. This is 7,000 calibrated years ago. This tephra is more than likely from newberry craters, and this would be the furthest extent of its distribution. And then just before that is a layer of charcoal, another layer of charcoal. Each of these is a charcoal layer, and we go on up here, and here's another tephra, and that's probably from Mount St. Helens, Washington. And what you can see is that in looking at this, is that every time there is a little bit of washing into the lake with this charcoal, here's the charcoal band, here's the charcoal band, we actually get a decrease in the percent organic matter, and you can see why is because when you have wash in, what you're doing is adding more sediment, more silt to that sample. And therefore, even though you're putting charcoal in, it will have a little lesser organic content. And so in places where we don't have charcoal bands, we have this. This sharp decreases in, here we go, here's two that go with charcoal bands. These sharp decreases in percent organic matter. That's kind of interesting. I know our time is short here, but so I'm not going to go back and do it, but I will tell you that if we compare this with the charcoal counts I just showed you, they come out pretty much on the nose. So we have all kinds of information here on the frequency, and I think a little bit on the intensity of fire at Lost Lake. Well, let me, I'm going to do one more thing, because it looks like I have 30 seconds. And you'll like this, I hope. One of the things we've noticed is a question of how far back in the record should you go to understand things about the ecosystem now that we're trying to manage. And it's a good question. And it turns out that if we look at, for example, the mountains of western Montana, let's push that over a little bit more, and these are all sites that we've worked on there, Lost Trail Pass Bog, Mary's Pond, and Sheep Mountain Bog. These are all from Missoula's south to Lost Trail. One of the things we noticed is that if we forget about the pine pollen, just look at the percentages of Douglas fir, of fir and of spruce, that the mid-holocene forests of that area, well, let's say all along the Bitterroots, and then east and west from there, the mid-holocene forests are dominated by dug fir. Over and over and over again, that's our most abundant macrofossil, and it's our most abundant, and lots of logical pine, I might add as well, and it's our most abundant macrofossil. And if we put all our records together, of course, there are different elevations in there, different forests involved, but what you see is that about 4,000 years ago, so here's the 4,000 scale about right there, somewhere in that vicinity, there's a change, and we begin to get more spruce and fir depending on where we are and less dug fir. And if we plot it as a ternary diagram, it would look something like this, let me go up here where I don't have to, here is a dug fir, fir and spruce, so this would be 100% fir, 100% dug fir, 100% spruce, so if we had dug firs, our dominant pollen type, we'd be off in this corner. If we had firs, our dominant pollen type, we'd be up here, and if we had spruce, we'd be here. What you can see happens, if we take all the sites, all this data, and we look at it, and here's Mazama to 4,000 years ago, so that's about 7,600 real years to about 4,400 years, real years ago. We find, because these are in BP, radiocarbon years, we find that we have all of our distributions here, and that as we go from less than 4,000 radiocarbon years ago to the present, that they're here. You see that? So the dug fir has, after several thousands of years, of occupying that position of important pollen type and important macrofossils as well, I might add, does that. And what happens at Lost Lake in the Blue Mountains? There it is. It's the same story. It looks like this. I've taken those three that I showed you from further east in Western Montana, and then here is Lost Lake. So this is 4,000 years ago to Mazama, and this is the last 4,000 years. So there is a regional pattern here, it looks like, or at least there's a regional pattern in Western Montana, and we first tried to investigate to see if that pattern is about the same. Here it is, and it seems like the major shift comes about 4,000 years ago. I'm out of time, and I'll be around for a little bit. Let me tell you that if you would like to know more about this, any of these sites or these localities that you can get a copy of a review I wrote that's set from Walla Walla, and it discusses the relationship of these, more than you want to know. And if you're interested in the first work that we've done on the blues at Lost Lake, I have a report that's overdue, but it's going to be finished next weekend. And you can obtain that from the office in John Day. So there are a few things out there. I think that if you're interested, you can actually get caught up on fairly easily. I'm out of time, so I'm going to leave it there. But I'd be happy to sit around and talk to anyone for as long as they'd like about Secrets of the Past. I think I'll leave everybody who needs to leave and get a chance to leave. And then we can ask questions for those people who want to leave her on today. Here, before we go, Jim, I'd like to mention that there's one of the Blue Mountain District Seminar series that's going on tomorrow.