In September, a falling spruce tree knocked one home off its foundation, flipped a pickup and triggered an evacuation alert for Gastineau Avenue. But when Juneau naturalist Steve Merli looked at a slice of the tree, he saw a much bigger story.
Naturalist Steve Merli stands next to the cookie from the spruce that fell on Gastineau Avenue on Sept. 27, 2022. The asymmetry of the rings shows that the tree was leaning out from a steep slope.
Carstensen said the rings tell us the tree was likely older than the United States. It sprouted and took root on the steep mountainside during the Little Ice Age, sometime in the 1700s. That’s back when Áakʼw Tʼáak Sít, the Mendenhall Glacier, extended about five miles further than it does today, and the Gastineau Channel was choked with icebergs. Typical August weather during the time included sleet.
Naturalist Richard Carstensen stands in front of an old spruce in the Behrends slide path in downtown Juneau. The spruce is extremely thick — Carstensen calls it “refuge diameter.” In other words, there’s safety in its girth. There aren’t many other trees around it because anything too much smaller gets toppled or buried.
It turns out big trees do well on steep hillsides, and not just because they aren’t likely to get logged. “Colluvium” is the term for rocky soil on slopes like these around Juneau. It’s coarser than soil in a valley, for instance, and will have rocks and even boulders in it. Those give roots something to hold onto. Carstensen said the deep water table on a very steep hillside also helps because trees will send their roots down further.
“Normally, a spruce gets started in a canopy gap, and the center rings are pretty big. But this tree was suppressed by an overhead canopy, so it was growing very slowly, like a hemlock grows in a forested, shady situation,” he said.
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