The American West’s most iconic tree is disappearing

Settlers relied on the strength of the now-vulnerable ponderosa

- GARY FERGUSON

CHIP SOMODEVILLA Getty Images

PONDEROSA PINE logs in Montana in 2019, after mountain pine beetles killed many trees.

A PROFOUND unraveling is underway in the American Southwest, happening across a thousand-mile arc from Santa Fe, N.M., to the central Sierra. In an unprecedented calamity, the most widely distributed and most iconic tree of the region — the beautiful ponderosa pine — is disappearing. So significant is this loss, both visually and ecologically, that it’s reasonably fair to say it may be triggering the first post-climate-change landscape in America.

It was the ponderosa pine that more than 1,100 years ago allowed the rise of the first cities in what would later become the United States, providing structural beams for the multi-storied dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo. More than 700 years later, under the tutelage of the Nez Perce, Lewis and Clark hewed boats from ponderosa trunks, using them to paddle from the mountains of western Montana to the Pacific Ocean.

Settlers used the tree with abandon, fashioning everything from barns to saloons, opera houses to hardware stores to livery stables. Ponderosa gave us literally millions of track ties for our railroads, then often provided the fuel for the fireboxes of the locomotives that ran along them.