Aspen   Rocky Mountain National Park

This story tree is located in Rocky Mountain National Park. It is an example of the results of good elk gone bad. In the winter, or when the maintenance checks haven’t come in, elk get hungry and will eat just about anything. Anything but calamari. They don’t seem to like calamari and as near as I can tell this is universal throughout the herds. But they do like aspen, or aspen bark to be more specific and therein lies the story and the problem .

When you chew on an aspen tree and you chew around the tree just like you would eat corn on the cob, unless you’re one of those corn on the cob eaters that chew down one row and then the next like a typewriter, the tree dies. This is harmful to the tree. Fortunately Nature has provided a safety net for the aspen by giving the elk a teeny-tiny little attention span so they will lose track of and forget what they’re doing and stop before they completely chew around the tree.

The problem however, lies in the number of elk there are relative to the number of aspen trees there are and when one elk leaves to go find out what the others are talking about, another steps up and chews away, sometimes completing the ringing process. This again is bad for the tree as noted above. But because Nature has decided we need aspen trees she has built-in some safeguards for their survival. One of these is the teeny-tiny little attention span of the elk, another is if even a very small amount of bark is left unchewed the tree will still be able to do all the tree things it needs to live, and yet another is Nature puts a lot of these trees together in one place to confuse the elk so they forget which one they were chewing on and start a fresh one, hopefully foiling their plan to ring the tree and cause its untimely demise. Mother Nature is so smart.

There are casualties however and many, many near death experiences for some of these aspen. The one pictured above is a survivor but just by the hair on its chinny chin chin. Every mark on it tells a story if you look closely. Down near the bottom of the image you will see a series of short vertical bite marks. This is where Eunice and her BFF Clarice had lunch one day while they talked about that new hunky bull that had been hanging out on the edge of the herd.

The long vertical fissure that looks like an ugly wound was done by Stab, a young not so hunky and clearly frustrated bull, who used the unoffending aspen as an antler sharpening station and caused a near fatal injury to the tree. There are many more stories written on this tree but probably the greatest story is the one that shows the trees endurance as well as its constancy. Battered and chewed on, frozen by the cold and nearly snapped in two by the fierce winter winds, the tree is a study in survivability. Scars not withstanding it is a wonderful example of it not allowing misfortune to overcome it. A lot of us have scars like that. But I believe the more massive and gnarly your scars are, the more interesting your life has been. And the more stories you have to tell.