Most of our campsite on the Grand Mesa in Western Colorado is surrounded by young aspen trees, 5 to 10 feet tall. Here in late September, their dancing leaves present every variety of gold: pure, stunning, solid gold that pops in the golden sunlight, all gradations of green-gold, including that gentle green of leaves with all their chlorophyll intact, and the deeper and warmer reddish gold, rare in these forests of single organisms that cover an entire mountainside.
When I was younger, camping in these mountains with teenage pals, we loved to burn dead aspens in our campfires because they’re easy to topple, light enough to carry large specimens to camp, and if dry, they burn like paper.
John Muir had a trick that he learned with a certain size of aspen saplings, about 15 or 20 feet tall: he would run up to one, climb it to the top, and grab the trunk where his weight would bend the entire tree toward the ground, gently drop him standing, whence he would let go and let the pliant sample snap back to its full height.
I taught this to my sons on one outing in Colorado’s South Park some years ago, and they got the concept immediately — much to my delight.
Scientists have long known that aspen groves, like these here in the Rockies, all around, are the largest organisms on earth, covering thousands of acres. But now they believe they are also the oldest living organisms. How else could they get so large?
Pando is the oldest known aspen grove in the world, located in southern Utah. It’s estimated at up to 80,000 years old. It covers over 100 acres and — at the moment — includes 40,000 individual aspen ‘trees’. Experts guess that it weighs 6,000 metric tons.
Here at our campsite, the wind plays multiple instruments with the trees all around: the full, distant rush as the wind flows in waves down mountainsides and across valleys, the gentle whisper of individual aspen leaves quaking amongst themselves, and the rustle of all these trees in unison right here in my face.
Aspen leaves in a light breeze will both shimmer and whisper. These two expressions go well together, as the shimmering is precisely how the sound should look, and the whispering is precisely how the quaking should sound.
Brilliant that an 80,000-year-old being of this size should speak and glow so softly.
