 The title of this presentation is Late Quaternary Environments of Eastern Oregon, Forest, and Fire History of Blue Mountain. 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, oh, 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 like to say just a little bit about some of the methods that are used. I have a few slides of Corrine 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. Tefra, 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 as 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, if 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 Ukiah 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, no, I don't know, 20,000 to maybe 15,000 years ago. And then beneath those cirks are some marines. So there are a couple of lakes in there that are down in the mixed conifer forest now. And behind those marines 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. And then in the Sylvies Valley, there's a little bit of a record. It 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? This is on the south side, not far from Duck Lake. I think Duck Lake is 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 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'll 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 kind of help 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. 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 then 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 to 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 it's, 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 that 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, the things we have to remember is that there's the changes in the area of where there was water and where there wasn't water. So as you know, 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 pro-glacial 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, in places like Fort Rock and Catlow Valley and Alvord Valley, there were, and Warner Valley, there were great places to see lakes. So those were important. And then the last thing for the Pacific Northwest interior that we have to keep in mind are volcanic activities. And 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. OK, 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 somebody's 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. 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 step. And the climate is a cold continental climate. Now, somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 or 13 thousand 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. We begin to see some interesting things happening. The first thing is that we have an initial treeless interlude still, sagebrushing, grass, step, predominant shrubs. And then we begin to see, this would be throughout the west, vegetation with very much of an alpine character. Let me explain what I mean 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 whatever, 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. Bistorts, polymoniums, areogynums. Oxyria, which is truly Arctic. Conegia, which is Arctic. And Shapurtia canadensis is really an interesting one because you say, oh yeah, Shapurtia canadensis, I know it is understory. Oh, the ponderosa in the Bitterroots or wherever you know, Shapurtia canadensis from. But we hardly find it in our Holocene pollen records. And in the late glacial, it's really rather common in 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 salaginellas, 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 Holocene, 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 Holocene because it's been traditional to think of the Holocene as being divided in three parts with the mid-Holocene 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-Holocene 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 as 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, some 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 communities varying through time? Ponderosa. Ponderosa. 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 this is just 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 and 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 just go to the south here a little ways into the Northern Great Basin, or into the Great Basin rather, and take a look at the history of Pinus monophila, 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 at up all the fossil sites. Mine, 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 its 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 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 Marat River Mountains. And we collected pack radmins 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. It 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. And 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 and Thuia 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. The shaded part of this overhead is the outside limits of the present. You OK? Could have scared you. Yeah. It, 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 a 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 clear water. Well, in any case, this is the present distribution. And Henry P. Hansen, a pioneering palinologist 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. There's 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. Well, 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.