Ecological Note from Ross Lake National Recreation Area

We recently followed the North Cascades Loop along State Route 20 through Washington Pass, followed the Columbia River, and then recrossed the Northern Cascades along US 2. I reported on some of the sights in a previous blog. The geology along our path was discussed in a series of posts that started just west of today’s location.

The North Cascades Visitor Center was closed for the season, so we stopped at Newhalem Creek where we followed a trail that led to a small hydroelectric generation plant on the Skagit river. I noticed several interesting ecological points of interest along the way.

Nurse logs are a common sight in the Pacific Northwest. Usually they comprise young trees growing out of stumps; I’ve even see them where the stump was gone, leaving the new tree standing on legs. There was a sign discussing this phenomenon, but this caught my eye. Note the hollow interior; this was not a fully grown tree, but the original nurse stump is completely gone.

I haven’t seen an example of a nurse log as good as this before. Trees are growing out of this decaying log; its top is covered by moss and lichens; and there was a poster explaining that the trees within the park often grew in linear sets of 3-6 trees. Some of these were large trees. Now I know why forest services, from county to federal, leave logs lying where they fell.