RISING FROM THE ASHES

Eight feet off the ground, I reach a stout old limb where I can stand straight up, tilt my head back and survey the route to the top. Before I can talk myself out of it, I focus on the next branch and grasp it, pulling myself up to it, and the next, and the next - the growing space below me fading from my awareness as the minutes pass. Nothing else in the world matters, only the shape and texture and fragility of the limb before me. When a broad horizontal branch offers a stance near the top of the tree, I step onto it, grab the main trunk for balance and open my gaze to the new world surrounding me. A sea of treetops unfurls at my feet, their green needles glowing in contrast with coal-black cinders below. A ridge studded with windflattened pines cuts a sharp skyline against a purple d desert landscape in the distance, where a bright red streak of cliff bisects the view into perfect halves. “OK, I got it.” Bill Hatcher’s voice breaks my reverie. I’ve forgotten that he’s out there somewhere, shooting photos, and that he’s goaded me into climbing up here in the first place. I look down, grateful for the multitude of sturdy limbs that will aid my descent. Ponderosa pines aren’t always so conducive to climbing, their limbless trunks often soaring straight out of the ground for 20, 30, 50 feet before a single branch is offered. But here in the cinder fields east of the San Francisco Peaks, the pines grow with numerous branches, some as big as their trunks: twisted, muscular arms that curve and dive like a spinning flamenco dancer. They grow out, up and down, with burly elbows and candelabra grace. Many have shapes reminiscent of a California oak - nothing like a ponderosa pine. These pines are straight out of a Dr. Seuss fantasy, but here in the black cinder soil, amid a hill country of extinct mini-volcanoes, squeezed between snow-draped peaks and sandblasted desert, Dr. Seuss’ oak-pines fit right in.

Only 1,000 years ago, as William the Conqueror fought for the rule of England, this scrambled landscape did not exist. Sunset Crater was yet a nascent landform, brewing underground, unseen and unrealized beneath an unremarkable pine forest. People lived here, growing corn and squash, hunting rabbits and deer, making babies, nurturing life. Compared with the tumult of northern Europe, life was pretty peaceful here in Northern Arizona. Then, one day, a crack formed in the seemingly solid earth. Lava rocks began spewing out of the crack, launching into the air in a fiery display and cooling as they fell back to the ground as hot little pebbles. We call them cinders. Forest fires ignited from the burning projectiles. Smoke filled the air. The bucolic little valley in the pines was suddenly not so pleasant. The people moved out of the disaster zone, most shacking up with their cousins a dozen miles away, just beyond the apocalypse. All the while, cinders accumulated, making piles that grew into hills. Where once there was a flat pine forest, there now was a blackened landscape of hot, smoking hills. The Hopis have the natural disaster recorded in their oral history, and archaeologists even offered an exact year for the eruptions - 1064. Based on tree rings found in beams that were used in the nearby dwellings at Wupatki National Monument, that date has been presented in geology classes ever since its first suggestion in 1958 by tree ring analyst Terah Smiley. Recently, however, further investigation suggested that the eruption was not in 1064, but in the mid-1080s.

These pines are straight out of a Dr. Seuss fantasy, but here in the black cinder soil, amid a hill country of extinct mini-volcanoes, squeezed between snow-draped peaks and sandblasted desert, Dr. Seuss' oak-pines fit right in.

OPPOSITE PAGE: Although not many plants can survive in this landscape, a few determined species find a way.

THIS PAGE: Writer Tyler Williams climbs a ponderosa pine to get a look at other tall trees in the area.

Sparse pines anchor a view of ripples in a cinder-covered hill.

The lava flows cooled and the giant cinder piles settled, but the landscape remained a scene of destruction: quiet, blackened and lifeless.

And while scientists once thought the eruptions continued for many decades, new evidence tells us the entire event was probably over in a few months. The lava flows cooled and the giant cinder piles settled, but the landscape remained a scene of destruc-tion: quiet, blackened and lifeless. As time ticked away and the cinders were eroded by the chiseling effects of weather, dust blew in and settled, and lichens found a foothold. From these nutrients, bushes grew, and sometime after the bushes, trees. It took about 500 years for this process to unfold. Another 440 years (or so) brings us to the present, and the wonderful woodland of mature pines we now climb, careful not to disturb even a dead branch - because these trees are a direct link to the ancient past, survivors in the most unlikely of settings. It seems strange to find robust pines growing out of nothing but rock, but as depauperate as the cinder soils might appear, they actually have some advantages over your average dirt. Typical solid soils force a percentage of rainfall and snowmelt to become runoff on the surface. The coarseness of cinders, however, allows water to sink to a depth where tree roots exist, aiding growth. Several inches below the surface, cinders retain more moisture than one might think. On a rainy day in these hills, I was surprised to find little pools of water gathered in depressions near the bases of trees. You could have had a good drink from some of them. Still, on a sunny June afternoon, surface temperatures on the black cinders can get high enough to kill proteins, so plant life has to happen a few inches below the surface, where it is much cooler. Again, the coarseness of the cinders helps here, their airy, loose nature conducting heat so poorly that the sunbaked surface quickly cools to a moderate temperature just a few inches down. It's plenty hospitable for the ponderosa pine seedlings, whose taproot can extend 20 inches into the cool zone. Grasses, however, require a more organic soil, and they only grow where the cinders are less than 10 inches deep. Throughout much of the cinder hills, there isn't a blade of grass in sight. The barren, wind-rippled cinders create a moonscape feel, but if it weren't for the few plants that do exist - mainly the pines and the Apache plume, a shrub with wild, hairlike seed heads reminiscent of a punk rocker's spiked mane this place would be just another desert scene. The juxtaposition of forest and lava flow makes it special.

The impressive Bonito Lava Flow is within the boundaries of Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, where a trail traces the edge of its sharp and breakable catacombs. Beyond the monument, which turns 90 next month, many of the cinder hills are an off-road-vehicle playground, crawling with enthusiasts on busy weekends but quiet most of the time, except for the whine of a distant dirt bike or just a mournful wind wailing through the pines. Still other parts of the cinder hills see neither four-wheelers nor tourists, and even though there are few trails, the landscape is perfect for hiking. The Apache plume is scattered in easily avoided clumps, and the soft cinders are easy on the knees, creating a quiet crunch with each step. The trees grow far apart, as if they have personal space issues. There are just enough of them that you can't call it a desert, but not so many that you'd call it a forest, either. Each pine grows with ample space to fully express itself here, and each seems to relish the opportunity. Bill and I walk through the weird woodland like kids in a candy store: “Whoa, look at that one!” “Check out that snag!” There seems to be an endless array of crazy, gnarled trees, and toward evening one day, we find ourselves crunching toward a hilltop to gain an overview of the twisted forest. There, near the summit of the hill, an old, orange-barked ponderosa grows horizontal to the ground, its 3-foot-thick trunk spawning a row of vertical “branches” each a small tree in itself. The tiptop of this old pine is only 30 feet off the ground, but the tree spans nearly 50 horizontal feet. A cage of circular limbs has created a windbreak that has collected a 2-foot-deep pile of rust-colored needles. They gather around the matriarch like a protective blanket. If it weren't for a rare confluence of events, ancient pines like this one might not be here at all. For young ponderosa pines to get established in any environment, there must first be a disturbance that eliminates the grasses, allowing the pine seeds to reach soil. Usually, this disturbance is fire. Immediately following the grass cleanse, there must be a wet year, producing more cones and seeds than the birds and squirrels can possibly eat (and they can eat a lot). Then, there must be another wet year, with moisture coming specifically in autumn.

millennium. As Northern Arizona University forestry professor Thomas Kolb understates, “Ponderosa regeneration is indeed a very rare event.” Sometime around 500 years ago, an establishment event took place in the cinder hills. And sometime not long afterward, a moth or other insect likely had its own population boom, feasting on the young trees at their apical meristems — the tender, tasty new growth, at the top of a tree, that eventually becomes the trunk. The pines, in response to getting eaten, diverted their energy sideways. The trees pushed onward, creatively molded into unusual shapes along the way. Every tree expert is quick to point out that we can't immediately finger the insects for this crazy growth pattern, because no conclusive research has been done in the cinder hills. Open environments that lack vertical competition for light also induce multiple branching, and genetic variation plays a role.

Once you gain an eye for oddball pines, they show up more often than you'd think. But nowhere are they as obvious as in the cinder hills. And nowhere do they grow with such stark, showy charisma.

grow with such stark, showy charisma. Whatever specific combination of events created the crazy trees, today we are left with a forest of Dr. Seuss pines, stretching their arms into fantastic shapes over a sea of cinder. Being among them, we are forced to acknowledge the impermanence of things. As enduring as the old trees are, they are merely a snapshot of time, like the hills they grow upon — frozen just now in a particularly animated pose. Just as the people who lived here 940 years ago knew, even the ground we walk on doesn't last forever. AH