(“A word of warning: all photographs are copyrighted material. If you wish to use any graphic on any of your web pages, slide presentations, or in any published material, you should first contact the individual to determine the conditions of use. You should expect to credit the photographer next to the photograph.” – Grissino-Mayer http://web.utk.edu/~grissino/gallery.htm#Copyright).

Additionally, you purposely cropped the original image to remove the credit that was part of the image (http://web.utk.edu/~grissino/images/foxtail.gif).

Tony Caprio

If a year starts out with a Siberian Express (north to south jet stream) and then there is a spring drought, the effect might be similar.

In either case, it ends up as a thicker detritus layer than other years, and on to fertilize the trees. Anyone who assumes that Bristlecones or Foxtails grow more with warmer temps, per se, may not understand all the factors involved in their growth.

It is a well-known dendro effect that logging creates a “release” for remaining trees. Dendro people say in an arm-waving way that nobody would take timber from bristlecone sites. I haven’t seen any direct references to any timber activity at this site, but the name Timber Gap is suggestive of some connection to timber. Looking at the pictures, the timber was probably taken from the lower trees but I’ve seen some evidence of timber being taken from high bristlecone sites for little mines (I’ll show this in my next post on this topic).

Could this road have opened up acess to alpine meadows for sheep? Of course it could.

I think that you have to canvass these things. But, even if nothing turns up, the sites are pretty and I hated to waste the work.