Customer Reviews

Timberline: Mountain and Arctic Forest Frontiers

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Timberline - where the trees end - is a biological boundry visible to even the casual traveler throughout North America. Where highways or hiking trails ascend to upper timberlines (ranging from below 2000-foot elevations in Alaska to over 11,000 feet in California), visitors see patchy forest and meadows giving way to stunted trees and finally to mere shrub-like trees and tundra. A lower timberline is seen in the semi-arid west at the foot of mountain ranges. Those who fly over northern Canada or Alaska see a cold produced "arctic timberline" snaking across the continent.

This book describes what timberlines are and why they exist, and what human uses have been made of the timberline enviroment. It surveys tree species and conditions of individual North American timberlines - in the Pacific Coast, Great Basin, Southwest and Mexican Mountains; in the Rockies and Northern Appalachians, and in the arctic - with reference to timberlines worldwide.

--- from book's back cover

This is not just a good book, it's a great one. Sadly it's a relatively unknown source for the accumulated wisdom of forest ecologist Steve Arno. That's probably due to it's having been published by The Mountaineers. Arno made his career as an ecologist for the US Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station, part of what those of us who worked for it consider the finest organization of its kind. The Stations and their labs, the research arm of the US Forest Service, are devoted to forestry research, grassland studies, wildlife research, climate change modeling, applied fire ecology, and a host of other forestry-related topics.

Stephen F. Arno's wisdom comes from a lifetime spent, at elevation, cataloging and describing the ecology of mountain pines and the ecosystems they inhabit. The book is packed with information about where mountain forests grow, why they are there, what makes them different one from the other, and what you're looking at whether you climb mountains or see them off in the distance. If you love the mountains of the American West, there is no better book to introduce you to the forests that cover them.