[NFB-Science] exploring pine trees on Mount San Jacinto

[John Miller]

Hello,
I live in San Diego California a few hundred feet above sea level.
I do not often get a chance to touch pine trees which grow in the mountains.
Last weekend on April 20 I went on a hike as part of the Blind Stokers Club www.blindstokersclub.org<http://www.blindstokersclub.org>.
The club got founded as a tandem cycling club with sighted and blind cyclists.
It has since branched out and there is now a blind hiking team.

Anyway, this e-mail is mostly about the pine trees I touched at San Jacinto State Park which is on top of Mount San Jacinto.
Mount San Jacinto is near Palm Springs. It is a 2 hour drive from my home if you leave at 6 A.M.  It is a 2 to 3 hour drive back home in the afternoon or evening.

To reach the top of the mountain we took the Palm Springs Aerial Tram.
The cable car starts its trip at 2600 feet elevation and after a 10 minute journey reaches its destination which is Mountain Station.
Mountain Station is at 8500 feet elevation. As an interesting side note, the floor of the aerial tram slowly rotates providing an enjoyable view out the glass walls for sighted passengers.  I joked to a blind friend that it was so fascinating how the music playing on the speakers mounted on the ceiling were slowly rotating relative to our position during the ride.
In fact we were rotating and the speakers were stationary but I cannot prove it.
The tram passes through 5 support towers on its journey from the bottom to its top.  You can read a lot on Wikipedia about why and how the tram works. I still have a lot of questions about its engineering design.

Back to the pine trees I touched.  There were two kind of pine trees I came across at 8500 feet elevation. The two trees I looked at were somewhere between Mountain Station and the Five Notches Loop Trail. My hike was about 3 miles with frequent pauses for the group to take it easy and enjoy the day.
The high temperature on the mountain on April 20 was 53 degrees. After taking the tram to the foot of the mountain in the late afternoon it was 90 to 95 degrees.
One of the pine trees was a long needled pine and the other was some kind of fir tree.
The needles of the fir tree reminded me quite a lot of the Christmas tree I get from Home Depot which is a Noble fir.
I do not know what kind of fir tree this was but when I crushed its needle it gave off a very lemony scent.
The long needled pine is almost certainly a Jeffrey Pine.
A crushed needle from the Jeffrey Pine smelled like a pine tree but not lemony at all.
Learning from Wikipedia I see that almost noone can tell Jeffrey pines apart from Ponda Rosa pines.
The Jeffrey pine trees have much longer pine cones than do the ponderosa pine trees.
Something like 4.5 to 8 inches long versus 2 to 4 inches.
I did not have the opportunity to touch a pine cone while on my adventure.
I read that ponderosa pines do not grow over 7500 feet so almost for sure the long needled pine was a Jeffrey Pine.
The mountain air on Mount San Jacinto smells amazing like a pine forest.
My sighted friends usually take in the trees just by walking past them.
I request of my friends or family that I stop and touch a few trees of each variety while on a hike near trees.
On this hike about half the trail was covered in snow or packed ice.  I also stopped to listen to a rushing mountain stream full of snow melt run-off.
There are very few rushing streams in San Diego. San Diego is a desert area.
I want to thank my friend Evan who organized the trip, provided transportation for me and others, and who was my hiking guide.
Evan is also the one who helped me find the pine trees to look at.
Very best,
John