[SINGING] SHAWN BRIGMAN: It's very important to show and celebrate that historically, western white pine was a signifier of our culture.

It was a lived culture.

JOHN SCHWANDT: Starting in the early 1900s white pine was so valuable and was so important to our economy, they declared it the state tree.

TERRIE JAIN: There was a series of decisions that occurred.

What they decided to do was to give up on the wild white pine.

If we have a house and we have a strong foundation, the house is going to stay standing.

Well, white pine played that exact role, and so by its just abundance ensured that the rest of the forest was functional and sustainable.

Well, put it this way, the house is falling apart.

DEL CONE: The change is phenomenal in respect that the trees are gone.

JASON REINHARDT: It would be easy to fall into the trap of blaming the folks for the decision they made at the time.

It happened and we have a landscape that exists as it does right now, and that's what we have to work with.

DOUG BRADETICH: I don't jump up and down go goodie goodie because we got to cut down a tree.

I know that another tree will come back and it's just part of the process.

DON PATTERSON: What I'd like to see is the return of the giants.

I would like to see 'em grow trees like this again.

DAVID ANDERSON: We need to know the lessons of the old trees, if we ever want to be successful at managing the young forests.

Once they're gone, we lose that history.

ANNOUNCER: Funding for Outdoor Idaho is made possible by the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation, committed to fulfilling the Moore and Bettis Family Legacy of building the great state of Idaho by the Friends of Idaho Public Television, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by the Idaho Public Television Endowment.

[MUSIC] LAUREN MELINK: Let me know when you're rolling.

DAVID ANDERSON: We are rolling And ready for you, Lauren .

MELINK: Okay.

This is new.

David, can you describe where you are exactly?

ANDERSON: I am sitting in a tree boat at about a hundred feet high in an ancient white pine.

It's between three and 350 years old.

And we are in far northern Idaho.

Oh, there's a really big white pine right through there.

Really big.

[Climbing sounds] [heavy breathing] ANDERSON: Canopy, ground control, I am lanyard-ed into a branch I have verified is alive.

MELINK: You're sitting at the top of a tree, can you tell us how we all ended up here today?

ANDERSON: We were looking for ancient white pines as a place to tell a story about their ecology and their preservation.

We went on a search.

We were calling foresters and universities and people were combing the woods and going back into their memories and trying to find these ancient trees.

If possible, we could nominate a new state champion, which is the largest example of that species in the state.

MELINK: So how did we get here?

Well, it started with a Zoom call, with me, David, the guy in the tree, Tom Eckberg, a forest health expert, and Marc Otto, an arborist who had a really, really bad internet connection.

ANDERSON: I'm looking for the new tallest white pine in the state of Idaho and hopefully maybe it's the tallest tree in Idaho as well.

And we want to climb it and measure it with a tape measure and hopefully we get an accurate measure from top to bottom.

MELINK: It turns out, that's kind of like finding a needle in a haystack.

But Tom told us he knew of some big trees that could be in the running.

TOM ECKBERG: I remember this area from working with the Forest Service almost 20 years ago.

Just a real nice stand, fairly easy to get to and big trees.

I will put a point on a map when I get there.

I know the place when I see it.

I know it's fairly easy, fairly accessible.

MELINK: Since he and Marc live in North Idaho they agreed to check them out for us and take some video.

ECKBERG: 52.9, 52.8 inches.

MELINK: With David's okay, a few weeks later, we headed north to find Tom's tree.

Hoping we could climb it, hoping it might be the tallest remaining white pine and hoping to tell the story of the state tree of Idaho.

A tree that means something to people - as a culture, a history, a livelihood and a lifestyle.

In the year and a half, we've been working on this story, we've learned this: The western white pine is a magnificent tree while standing and a superior wood after being cut.

It's symbolic of the past and of the future of Idaho - to people from across belief systems.

This tree sits at the crux of conservation and capitalism, representative of what Idaho is, in its rawest form, and at its very core.

SHAWN BRIGMAN: It's very important to show and celebrate western white pine was a signifier of our culture, it was a lived culture.

It's a material that was very important to us.

Specifically, for employing on the bark sturgeon nose canoe.

And we would historically use the bark sturgeon nose canoe to harvest our traditional foods, our roots and berries, to go fishing, to go historically set the dip nets, or to go fish with our historical fish spears.

So that's the way that this western white pine ties in with our culture.

I'm an enrolled member of the Spokane Tribe of Indians; I also descend from many of the regional plateau tribes.

So, I also descend from the Arrow Lakes people of British Columbia, the Kalispel tribe, and also the Kamloops Indian Band of Kamloops, British Columbia.

[Let's bless the people first] Through the process of colonization we kind of lost a little bit of our continuity line with our culture, but I would argue that it's a dotted line, that there's pieces of the culture that are still there in a dotted line, and I'm here to just help fill in that dotted line with a full continuity line.

I think we got everyone here, so what we're doing today is we're going to fell a western white pine tree and historically that's what we use to skin the bark sturgeon nose canoe of the local Kalispel peoples.

[Chainsaw revving] [tree falling] A Kalispell bark sturgeon nose canoe is a canoe that's constructed using materials from the geographical region.

So, this style of canoe is unique and distinct to the northern plateau because all of the materials actually come from this region.

For the skin of the canoe, it would be western white pine bark.

There's usually pine pitch and bear fat used to seam that bark.

For the frame itself, it's called, it's western red cedar for the long battens.

It's rocky mountain maple for the ribs.

It's bitter cherry bark for the lashings.

[MUSIC] Here we go.

Today I would like to go harvest birch bark for the nose ends of the Kalispell style sturgeon nose canoe.

[PEELING BARK] Just like when you hear of the pyramids at Giza or Machu Picchu down in South America.

That's what I see in this bark sturgeon nose canoe is this is a signifier of the region that we're in.

Historically they would girdle the western white pine right down the center, and then they would have to cut around the circumference of the tree, and then they would peel it off in one full sheet.

Mhuya, as she was leading our bark harvest and we had just finished it, just within the natural process of us all harvesting, she sensed that as soon as we got that full sheet of bark off that we all might as well put it on our shoulders and walk it in a procession up from the harvest site up to the road.

With this canoe, we're just using the skin, and then that skin gets sculpted onto a frame .

And so, there was that moment where I wanted to marry the bark skin with the frame.

I just kind of wanted to do that in the privacy of me being able to concentrate on doing that.

'Cause I only get one shot at the bark.

[WAVES SPLASHING] It's very important for the next generation of youth to see that it's still possible to live our culture.

To demonstrate to the community that our ancestral water heritage is not past tense only, it's also present tense with all this contemporary modern-day living.

Know that those materials that were alive in the forest have been processed into a living heritage to empower our community, and they still live on in the canoe.

[MUSIC FADES] ANDERSON: We came out here and found this tree and identified it.

It looked like it was not only huge, but it was going to be climbable.

[But if I'm going to climb a big tree, I want to one that I'll be able to pass through the branches...] Climbing the ancient trees is a particular challenge that not a lot of people are ready for.

This tree in particular is just difficult in ways that I hadn't even imagined.

The first step in climbing a tall tree is to install a line.

We were using a crossbow yesterday, and for reasons that I'm still not sure, the crossbow kept malfunctioning.

The line kept breaking.

It was bunching up on the reel and snapping, and after hours of that, we had to give up on the crossbow.

Then we're using a big shot, which is a giant slingshot on like an eight-foot pole.

Three of us were trying again and again and again.

And you have to tie into the tree with a lanyard, a long lanyard, and start climbing the tree with multiple lanyards.

[Breathing] I am always nervous on a climb like this.

There's a certain amount of fear that is healthy.

A little bit of fear is healthy.

I'm in the space of the tree.

I have to respect the tree and I have to respect gravity.

[MUSIC] DON PATTERSON: We are probably six miles from Bovill, the town of Bovill.

We are on federal forest lands right now.

We're really close to a place called Cougar Meadows.

We are at the stump of what was called the White Pine King.

It's a historically significant tree that was part of the early history of the timber industry here in this part of the country.

I heard the story mainly by seeing old photographs and tried to piece it together.

I found the book by John B. Miller and he had a map that was pretty general, but he showed this location and I decided to come back out and try to find it.

We weren't sure we were going to be able to find it, we knew if we wandered around long enough that we would come across something.

It was thought to be the biggest white pine tree in the world, so it was very popular.

People in the town of Bovill knew about it and would come out and visit it, ride on horseback, have picnic lunches with primitive cameras, took pictures of themselves there, kind of a selfie type of approach.

Then in about 1911, they decided the tree was dying and they needed to fall it and take it to the mill.

And so people came from Potlatch by rail and rode cars all the way out to the site.

There's pictures taken of the setup with the tree by itself.

And then trees with fallers starting to make the cuts.

The tree beginning to fall, the tree being loaded up onto flat cars.

The tree being taken into the town of Potlatch and then the tree being processed through the mill and very large boards being made out of the tree.

29,000 board feet.

At the time, they thought it would be worth about $2,400.

In today's world, that would be about $80,000.

I'm trying to tell the story of what we used to have out here to try to encourage people to grow more white pine.

Northern California has its giant redwoods.

If we had groves of giant white pines like this, people would come see it.

JOHN SCHWANDT: White pine was such an economic driver starting in the early 1900s.

The timber industry was well aware of what a good wood it was.

It was perfectly suited for all kinds of purposes.

And by 1900, the eastern coast white pine forest had been pretty well cut over.

And so they had moved on to midwestern white pine in Minnesota, Michigan.

The lake states had eastern white pine and same big, huge stands of eastern white pine.

And so those were being liquidated.

And then starting people found out, oh my gosh, in northern Idaho, west eastern Washington and Montana, and the moist forest there, they had western white pine, which was even bigger than eastern white pine growing in tremendous stands.

And you could have western white pine trees that were two and three feet in diameter, only 10 feet apart, which no other tree species can do that.

So that meant what we call the carrying capacity on an acre was like 50,000 board feet of tree lumber per acre.

And most other species, it's fifth of that.

When they realized that there was so many white pine and it was such a good species, mills sprung up all over.

MELINK: One of those mills was Potlatch, built in 1904 by the Potlatch Lumber Company, it was the largest white pine mill in the world.

Potlatch Lumber Company believed that in order to sustain its product, it needed to build a town alongside the mill.

So, by 1906, the company had built 128 houses, two boarding houses, two schools, a hotel, two churches, a store, bank, post office, and an opera house.

DEL CONE: I saw trucks lined up through Potlatch from the Potlatch Mill, probably 40 to 50 of them lined up trying to get unloaded right up through Sixth Street in town.

But, town used to be quite a little bit larger.

We had a bigger school.

In town we had the Potlatch Hotel that was open.

The hotel was a three-story building.

It had a barber shop in it.

It had a restaurant in it.

We had some dances.

We had the grange halls.

The granges around here were very active.

That's where you used to go to fraternize with people.

On a Saturday night you'd have quite a party downtown because a lot of the loggers - loggers were tough fellers, every one of them, and I was one of the halfway tough ones.

There's not as many people around.

People who moved to where jobs are.

And that's what we see.

The small towns keep getting a little smaller, the big towns keep getting a little bigger.

But at the same time, we've got a better life now than anybody in the big towns.

MELINK: Due to a declining lumber market, in 1983 the Potlatch Mill permanently closed.

But in the years before it closed, there were a series of events that resulted in the western white pine being nearly wiped off the landscape.

MELINK: Can you summarize the white pine story and why it should be told?

What's going on with this tree?

ANDERSON: The white pine is the state tree of Idaho and that should tell us something about why they're special to this state.

They used to be a centerpiece in the economy of the state of Idaho.

A hundred years ago.

But now the old trees are almost gone.

They have been logged, which is a part of our economy.

It's a part of our history, but there have been waves of diseases that have wiped out the trees as well.

And now we are in a small patch of old growth forest, and even the top of this tree looked like it died once upon a time and was regrown.

We think that it might've died from blister rust and then grown a new top.

So, it's hard to find in what used to be a landscape of ancient massive trees.

It's hard to find those trees nowadays.

And the state's record, or champion white pine was called the Floodwood Giant.

It was 230 feet tall.

And we were going to climb that tree until we found out that it had died.

It had died from blister rust, from one of these introduced diseases that's not even native to the United States.

TOM ECKBERG: White pine blister rust is a non-native fungal disease.

It originates in Asia or Eurasia made its way to Europe.

So, if foresters in the late 1800s, early 1900s, wanted to grow seedlings, what they would do is they would collect seed in North America and send it to Europe, France or Germany, typically, grow the seeds out there and then ship the seedlings back.

ISABELLA VALDEZ: It's a fungal disease that can have up to five spore stages.

But in order to complete its complex life cycle, it has to go between its primary host, which are white pines, any five needle pines, and then it goes to its alternate host, which are gooseberries and currants.

They then go through other stages of their life on those plants, and then the spores at the final stage on their alternate host can then reinfect the pine.

When white pine blisters infects the branch, it comes in through a needle and then it starts into a branch and then it starts forming fungal tissue killing tree tissue underneath the bark.

And so what you'll see on a branch is you'll see swelling because that fungal tissue is growing underneath the bark.

And then the bark will crack and the fungus will produce these pustules that are, they look kind of like blisters.

The canker will get bigger and bigger, and then eventually when it gets on the main trunk of the tree, that's when you have to really be concerned.

Once that canker spreads and it continues all the way around the bowl of the tree, then it's effectively girdling it and everything above that is going to die the same way that it does on a branch.

JASON REINHARDT: When white pine blister rust was introduced, people really quickly realized that it was going to be a problem, and it only took a few decades for it to really start wreaking havoc.

SCHWANDT: When we realized that ribes or gooseberries were the weak link in it, we were going to do everything to get rid of it.

So, the idea was, well, let's pull it out, or let's spray it.

And actually from 1910, about until 1945, we tried the eradication program.

And they ended up hiring people to go out, and they called them blister rust camps, BRC.

TERRIE JAIN: So by about 1934, there was 11,000 people working the stands to remove every alternative host, the current or the gooseberry, and they would literally create huge clear cuts, burn them as hot as they could, and then they would line up man between lines and they would go and pick every gooseberry out of the system.

SCHWANDT: The spores that are produced on the ribes plants can't go very far.

So they thought, oh, well, if we could get rid of the ribes, then the pines would be fine, and the pines produce spores that can go miles.

But at that time, they didn't realize how far they could go to find a ribes plant.

MELINK: Ultimately, tearing out the gooseberry and currant plants did nothing to stop the spread of blister rust.

JAIN: So, what they decided to do was to give up on the wild white pine.

So, they quit favoring it in the thinnings, they quit completely managing it.

We decided to go for a mass salvage.

We took every timber-sized tree off this forest, as many as we could reach, and did that in about 10 years.

LAUREN FINS: What they didn't understand was that trees could get blister rust, survive for a long time with blister rust, and in fact, be relatively healthy.

So that was a knowledge that we came to later, but that was after many of these stands were already gone.

So, what we missed was the opportunity to have that genetic diversity.

REINHARDT: It was kind of a product of policy at the time, but I don't think that we should necessarily blame them because they were working within the confines of the body of knowledge of forestry and ecology at that time, We have learned a lot in the last 70 years and with the benefit of all that knowledge in hindsight now, we would make different decisions, I think, but I don't also don't necessarily think it's productive to cast blame or blame anyone for the salvage effort.

MELINK: Fortunately, in the midst of the mass salvage, a man by the name of Dick Bingham began to notice something interesting happening amongst the stands of western white pine trees.

MARC RUST: He was a very early proponent of seeking out and finding genetic resistance to white pine blister rust in western white pine.

And he realized that there was genetic resistance at a very low level, but that it could be captured and then utilized to produce rust resistant stock for planting.

JAIN: So, you could walk into the stand to a particular place.

And 99.999% of the trees were dead by blisters.

But there was this one and it was fully crowned, had huge cones in it.

It was just beautiful.

And so, he started scratching his head and he started to realize that there's something going on with these trees.

PATTERSON: Foresters would travel out in the woods and find a tree that was in the sea of dying white pine that showed resistance, and they identified over 4,000 of those coming from the Clearwater all the way up into British Columbia.

So those trees have been used for a breeding program.

RUST: These are mostly seedlings from crosses, and these are seedlings that fared well in artificial inoculation trials that the Forest Service conducted for many, many years and they didn't get infected or they got infected and overcame the infection and they were planted here for tree breeding.

PATTERSON: And those trees have been providing the genetic material for the breeding program that's been in place for the last 75 years.

ARAM ERAMIAN: We're following on the shoulders of Richard Bingham who started this whole program in 1956.

The Coeur d'Alene nursery in general provides tree seedlings for all of Region One, which is all of Montana, all of Idaho down to Riggins.

We went back to the stands where all the white pine was killed except for these few individuals.

And we went to those trees.

We collected cones, we grew the seedlings, purposely infected them with blister rust and ran 'em through our three-year trial in the field and measured all the attributes, measured when they were infected with blister rust and reported the ones that resisted blister rust.

We also measured high growth on those trees.

And so, all of those individuals that were in the top percentages are now represented in our seed orchard.

This year we have orders for half a million white pine seedlings.

MELINK: Today, all the western white pine seedlings planted in Idaho forests were bred to be blister-rust resistant.

That resistance comes in a variety of ways.

One way is that resistant trees shed the needles before the fungus can enter the stem.

Others wall off the bark at the base of the branch when the fungus reaches the trunk, so it can't enter the tree.

FINS: When people use the term genetically modified, it conjures up zombie trees, Frankenstein trees.

So, I don't use that term because we've had agricultural breeding for hundreds of years.

ERAMIAN: All the genetics of that tree are in this package.

FINS: People have been breeding crops and improving them through standard breeding practices.

And that's what we were doing.

So yes, it is genetic modification in the sense of, you're selecting for certain properties, you're selecting for certain traits, and you're breeding those trees together to increase the probability of those traits, to increase the numbers of trees that have those traits.

But we weren't going in and you know, taking a little ratchet and tweaking the genes.

RUST: If you're going to plant a tree that's going to be there for 60 years, you probably want to plant a good one.

Right?

Makes sense.

Our focus is using what we call traditional plant breeding techniques and applying them to trees.

MELINK: Research will inform industry decision on what to do, when to do and how it should be done.

A 70-plus-year old science experiment, like Dick Bingham's seed orchard, has had lasting effects.

Which is why the science must continue.

Projects happening at the Priest River Experimental Forest are powerful examples of human ingenuity, patience and passion.

REINHARDT: For the spore trapping project, we have built these spore traps using a small motor assembly and a control board.

They're built to capture spores in a way that not only verifies the presence of the pathogen that causes blister rust, but also potentially the abundance of the spore load within that area.

The traps do this by essentially having an articulated arm with a spinning motor on the end of it.

And that motor spins at a set speed, we attach microscope slides to it, those microscope slides are coated in grease, and as they spin, they capture whatever is in the air, particulates, spores, anything like that.

PATRICK BENNETT: And then they extract DNA from the Vaseline solution.

And ultimately, this is going to be used for a very precise and very targeted molecular assay that is only designed to pick up the DNA of Cronartium ribicola, which causes white pine blister rust.

And we can use a whole bunch of mathematical equations to translate that to inoculum density in the air.

REINHARDT: We hope to define a relationship between environmental conditions and topography and the infection risk on a site.

And ultimately what we wanted to be able to do is be able to describe where you're likely to have a high infection risk and where you're likely to have less of an infection risk.

BENNETT: It does get me excited to come up with these sort of research questions, figure out how they're going to be implemented, how the experiment is going to be designed, what methods we're going to use, and then seeing the results.

I mean, it's like opening presents on Christmas day when you make those first graphs, see what your results are and like, are able to, oh, I wonder if this is showing the influence of X, Y, or Z on your results.

And being able to show that to people, share that information with the world, that's all really exciting to me.

[LAB NOISE] [NATURE SOUNDS] MELINK: Can you describe what it looks like from up there and what the scenery and the environment of this area is?

ANDERSON: We are in a small patch of old growth forest, and you can see the complexity of this forest.

The trees are all different sizes, they're different shapes.

And then out in the distance, as far as you can see, it's a rolling carpet of second growth forest until the farthest mountain range way out in the distance.

And I mean, you can see tens of miles out into infinity.

It's amazing.

MELINK: For all their romanticized imagery of age and wisdom, if there's one thing we've learned, it's that big trees are constantly under attack.

If a white pine happens to avoid being infected with blister rust, something else – in this case, bugs – are waiting in the wings, ready to feed.

BENNETT: Yeah, I believe this is an adult Dendroctonus ponderosae, or mountain beetle, that just crawled out this gallery here on the inside of this western white pine bark.

It is a remarkably small beetle that has a remarkably large effect in forests.

The adult female beetles chew into the tree through the bark and they etch these galleries and lay their eggs in the phloem layer as they're eating through the phloem layer or the sugary part of the tree underneath the bark.

But the effect that this has on the tree, this disruption of that phloem layer completely disrupts the physiological process of sugar transportation in the tree.

The tree is effectively girdled and dies standing.

So, what we saw today was a relatively large western white pine tree that was completely, what we call, mass attacked by mountain pine beetle.

MELINK: And yet, scientists maintain that planting white pine is the best way to ensure a healthy forest ecosystem.

Which is why, on a hot spring day in May, crews are navigating a hillside ravaged by fire and salvaged for timber to get white pine in the ground before the summer dry-up.

JASON JERMAN: We were planting on a spacing grid of 11 foot by 11 foot, which translates to about 360 trees per acre.

It's a 15-person crew and on average they'll usually get about a thousand seedlings planted per person.

Those men work very hard and they're very efficient at what they do.

The stands at the time of the fire were overwhelmingly stocked with western hemlock, grand fir So we were primarily expecting to get natural regeneration of very large numbers of grand fir and western hemlock which is not in alignment with our forest plan goals and objectives.

Our forest plan goals and objectives are pretty focused on trying to restore or return western white pine, western larch, ponderosa pine, birch and aspen, cottonwood to the landscape again.

ALAN HARPER: And really the best way to get it back into a healthy forest is take it all out, put the trees back in the ground that need to be there, that are going to be resistant to the disease that happened to be there.

JERMAN: White pine really does function like a keystone species in these North Idaho ecosystems in the sense that it has profound effects on the entire forest community in terms of what you actually still have growing on that site.

They have a more open structure that allows a lot of filtered sunlight to make it through even a fully stocked stand.

So historic stands of white pine had this really rich understory community typically along with them and all the plants and insects and birds that are associated with all of that.

Well, in the wake of losing white pine, it didn't just leave gaps in the forest in perpetuity.

There were other species that occupied that space and predominantly the species that filled in the gaps as white pine was dying out were the more shade tolerant species that would also grow underneath white pine.

And the trees that have filled those gaps are grand fir, hemlock, cedar.

The way they grow needles, the density of the canopy that they grow in the layers of the canopy means that they occupy, they grab every last fleck of sunlight that comes down out of the open sky and leave very little light, if any, making it directly to the forest floor.

And that inhibits any other plant growth, so much so that they'll even inhibit their own seedlings from growing.

In terms of richness of plants and other animals and stuff available those stands will almost become like a biological desert.

When you get regeneration following a new stand replacing disturbance, you don't get white pine back.

You get what you have.

And so, we've lost an entire enormous chunk of natural forest succession; these stands aren't able to remedy themselves because they don't have a seed source available on site to actually get there.

So that creates a need for us to intervene somehow to try and insert white pine back on the sites.

MELINK: Scientists are worried because the trees that have filled the space white pine left behind, are particularly vulnerable to root disease, a tree killing fungus that lives in the soil.

BENNETT: See the white mycelial fans of armillaria here.

This is causing armillaria root disease in this western white pine.

REINHARDT: Northern Idaho is kind of the root disease epicenter of the western part of the country.

And what we see is that a lot of these species that have kind of filled in behind western white pine to take up its growing space as it's vanished, those trees also happen to be some of the most susceptible trees to root disease.

JERMAN: So, what we're tending to see is this very slow persistent mortality across the land all over the place.

And it's creeping, cruddy stuff.

It's not the bright, flagrant kind of flamboyant stuff like mortality following a fire or mountain pine beetle, it's almost like a cancer.

You can't see it, but it's there.

And that impact is magnified because of the shift to species that are primary hosts for those root diseases, right?

White pine's not a primary host for it, it's much more resistant to it.

JAIN: We predict that root disease is going to kill in the next eight to 10 years, 25 percent of the forest.

We are killing more trees of root disease right now than fires are.

Our forest is falling apart because we just let the diseases out.

We don't have the species diversity we had, and so we will see stands that are 50 to 70 years old dying right now, and we're losing the productivity.

We have to attack the areas that have the root disease, that still have trees of economic value, so that we can harvest them and actually replace that and restore not only white pine, but western larch, ponderosa pine, so that not only do we end up with just white pine, but we end up with a seven to eight tree species that once were here.

Our work is cut out for us.

We really do need to move because the diseases are killing our trees quickly.

MELINK: The western white pine is also substantially more resilient to the effects of climate change and drought in contrast with the trees that have grown in its stead.

JAIN: western white pine adapted to the broadest breadth of environments.

So, it kind of took in all the different disturbances and said, okay, I can handle that, and I am going to be able to adapt to all of them.

So basically, as we go into climate change, it is well suited to adapt to whatever kind of climate that we might have and the different weather patterns.

JERMAN: White pine has a much better ability to withstand droughty conditions.

So, thinking future climate kind of stuff, it's far more drought tolerant than grand fir, western hemlock, western red cedar on the same sites.

So, it's going to have a much higher probability of actually having resistance and resilience to just long-term climate kind of disturbance over time.

[Huckleberry!]

ANDERSON: I am an ornithologist by training.

I'm a biologist who studies birds.

I started tree climbing in 1995 and I would take my friends, they'd come to me and say, "Hey, David, you're in the top of the forest.

Can I go with you?"

Canopy Watch is a nonprofit.

We raise money through donations that allow us to guide more people on tree climbs.

And then we also guide scientists.

Scientists need to study life at the top of the forest, not just at the bottom of the forest.

And that's another one of our missions is to help the evolution of science, to protect the forests.

MELINK: For those who work in the timber industry, protecting the forest is about preserving a historic livelihood and a way of life.

HARPER: I think that if you were to talk to just about any logger that works in the woods or forester that half the reason that they chose that job is they like the outdoors, they appreciate nature and the woods, and they found a way to make a living however difficult it might be.

I don't think they'd trade it for anything.

They like working out here and they want to do the right thing.

They want to do what's good for the ground.

MELINK: And tell me, how do you feel about your line of work?

Do you like it?

KYLER GORDON: Oh, I love it.

Wouldn't trade it for the world.

MELINK: What's so fun about it?

GORDON: Just being in the woods, I guess.

I don't know.

I've always done it.

Love being out here.

Love the hours.

Don't see nobody, it's perfect.

HARPER: There's not a lot of white pine that's cut anymore.

And so, the amount of white pine that we run through our mill might be 6 million to 7 million feet of logs a year, which really isn't a lot when you think about that.

We might cut 650 million feet of logs total through our company.

So, it's a small part of what we do.

Our customers would like more, but when we're on the federal jobs, it's the preferred tree to leave when we're doing a logging job because it does have a better survival rate.

But yeah, we'd love to see more white pine growing and become mature to where we could utilize it for lumber.

I think that there are people that are somewhat still resistant because it costs a lot of money to plant trees in the ground.

And if 30 percent of them die, that's a financial hardship for you.

So there are areas or some landowners that don't want to plant white pine.

Root disease has always been here.

When we do harvesting in areas that you can tell has root disease, you can plant species then that are not susceptible to that.

The white pine is good for that.

Is it a big concern?

No, but it is something that forest managers have to think about all the time, when we're out managing the forest.

[You go to one of these rallies, and you see the spirit and the enthusiasm that's involved] MELINK: Logging is capable of conjuring up a range of emotions.

Over the years, protests for and against cutting down trees have cropped up as personal beliefs have come into conflict with business interests, forest policy, advocacy and capitalism.

But the truth is, in our current society, we need wood and we like it too.

FINS: The more we plant genetically improved trees that are faster growing, and have good other properties, the less landowners will be compelled to harvest natural stands.

If we produce trees as a crop, then we don't have to go into those old growth stands to produce the wood.

We are not weaned of wood.

You look at my house, you look at other people's houses.

We have wood shingles, we have wood decks.

We have wood interior.

We have not weaned ourselves from wood.

So we, if we're going to keep doing that, using wood, we need to grow it.

HARPER: If you're building houses out of steel, I mean you're tearing up the earth with digging pits to get your minerals to make the steel.

So really logging, if you compare it to mining, is certainly a lot less difficult on the ground.

DOUG BRADETICH: White pine was always worth at least twice if not more of the other species.

It was very valued.

You can look out across the mountain side, and you can pick out a white pine like nothing.

It looks just like steps on a ladder.

Those whirls of branches just go up and in between that is no knots.

You have all clear spacings in between.

So, if you're looking at door and window blanks, kick panels, all of the different parts that go into a window casing and all, and you're looking for clear wood, that's what you're going to be looking for.

STEVE SPLETSTOSER: It's a very uniform species.

The logs are reasonably straight.

There's not as much taper from end to end as some species.

So, when we run a white pine through our sawmill, it's very uniform.

It's easier to handle.

It goes through the saws very well.

It's very weather resistant.

It takes stain and paint very well, and it withstands weather well.

I wish there was more of it out there to cut.

DOUG BRADETICH: One of the things that this inland forest here, I feel we've always been blessed with that.

You go west and you've got Douglas fir or you've got hemlock, you go in the Southeast, you have some planted plantation pine.

Out here we've got several different species of fir.

We've got three species of pine, we've got spruce, we've got cedar, we've got all kinds of different species.

So, no matter what happens with the weather, if a certain insect comes through a certain disease, you've always got something else to fall back on.

[Tree climbers talking] ANDERSON: Yeah, one fork in it could be dead.

Can we get a tree boat in any of those, maybe this one off to the left?

AUGUST SCHILLING: Maybe that one off to the left.

Certainly, looks like it's got a good angle.

Can't really tell how alive it is.

That'll be something we'll inspect when we're up there.

ANDERSON: We came out here and found this tree and identified it.

It looked like it was not only huge, but it was going to be climbable.

Not all of the old trees are climbable for a lot of reasons.

They might have dead tops, dead branches, disease, and we found this tree.

It was suitable, it's glorious, and it took three people an entire day to pioneer this tree and climb it and get ready for us to be up here.

We measured it with a tape measure.

It took two measurements, one from near the top to the top and one from near the top to the bottom, and we came up with 179.85 feet.

[As far as challenging goes, this tree is challenging.]

The thing is, is that not everybody can take or undertake this climb.

It's not easy, it's not even easy for professional tree climbers, but by filming our story and sharing our story, everybody can get a feel for how rigorous it is and how beautiful it is at the top of this forest.

And that's my goal, is to be able to share a story with the largest audience possible and help more people appreciate the beauty of these trees.

MELINK: Why should people care about white pines?

Why do we care if they just all disappear?

[Radio beep] ANDERSON: We need to know the lessons of the old trees if we ever want to be successful at managing the young forests.

If we don't understand that biology, it makes us less capable managers of the new forests and we need to have these living specimens.

Once they're gone, we lose that history.

This tree is at least 300 years old.

It could be as old as 350.

This tree was here before the settlers.

It saw the Native Americans walking through the forest, living their lives.

It was here when the grizzly bears and the elk were roaming the landscape.

It saw the arrival of the Europeans, actually, it saw the surrounding forests get logged and it survived that.

I wonder how that felt to be an old tree and see the other trees get logged.

But this tree has seen everything that's gone through here.

It's seen massive wildfires.

Everything that has come to this continent has passed by or through or over this forest, and this tree has seen it all and it's still here.

SHAWN BRIGMAN: Western white pine has been here since time immemorial.

The bark sturgeon nose canoe has been here since time immemorial.

And then also the local tribal groups, especially even with their marriage patterns and movement patterns and harvest patterns, that's been here since time immemorial as well When I'm harvesting the material, I actually don't see borders, so when I cross the 49th parallel to get into British Columbia.

If I cross the state line to get from Washington state to North Idaho, to me those are imaginary lines.

So psychologically, I don't see those lines.

I learned early on that my obsessive compulsive to build this perfect canoe, as more years go on, that's out the door, you just go with the flow.

So, if we fell the tree and it hits another tree and bruises a little bit, gets a little crack in it, we just work with it.

That's what we do.

Just like we as people, we all have bruises, we all have a little bit of things that we've gone through, and we still work with it in a positive way to get to somewhere.

JAIN: There's something that's important to humans, and it's called a sense of place, the ability of a person to have a day picking huckleberries and enjoying the woods and the forest.

For the person to be able to sit and maybe meditate with quietness.

People need to understand the role of white pine so that they can understand why it's important and why they need it, to be able to experience those things in the forest and to have that sense of place.

It'd be a benefit to our own society and individuals if we spent the time to learn about these forests and the role of white pine, FINS: There's something majestic about it.

There's something spiritual about it, about these trees, they were there for 300, 500 years and still going.

There's something very special about that.

PATTERSON: If you see a big white pine tree like this, it is hard not to be impressed and I'd love to see 'em again.

I love to show the grandkids.

And if I can find some out in the wild still left that are that big, I'm going to take 'em to it.

MELINK: It's been a year since we first climbed the white pine and we're finally wrapping up this project, so I emailed David to find out if the tree we climbed was a champion tree of Idaho.

And here is what he said: There are probably other, larger trees out there, but as of today, ANDERSON: It's the only one we know of.

To make a legitimate submission we'd have to do more intensive searching, starting with LiDAR satellite imagery of northern Idaho, before we could say if this tree is a likely champion.

But we can say that as of today, it's the largest white pine we know of in Idaho.

That's the truth.

[Music] ANNOUNCER: Funding for Outdoor Idaho is made possible by the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation committed to fulfilling the Moore and Bettis Family Legacy of building the great state of Idaho, by the Friends of Idaho Public Television, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by the Idaho Public Television Endowment.

To find more information about these shows, visit us at Idahoptv.org [Music]