More high altitude tree-hugging.
9th February 2025
(Above) The crags and lochan at the upper end of Coire Ardair. Really quite busy at Creag Meagaidh today with several parties on some of our classic lower grade gully routes. Raeburn’s Gully, Centre Post and Staghorn Gully all with visible climbers part way up these routes when I arrived mid-morning. Beautiful day with clear skies and cold temperatures in shaded areas but milder in the sun. No surprise then that the car park was full.
(Above) Prolonged cold temperatures are maintaining some instability beneath a surface slab on some N to E aspects, more noticeable above 1000m. Wide variety of surface conditions though depending on altitude and aspect – snow-ice, breakable crust and windslab all present quite often cheek-by-jowl. Good general snow stability just a somewhat localised old windslab problem in some places at high altitude.
(Above) High altitude tree-hugging. Found another lonesome ‘pine’ (probably sitka spruce again) this time at 920m in Coire nan Gamhna.
(Above) Unpromising habitat: cold, harsh and a bit sunless in this high coire. Sitka spruce gets a bad rep in the UK – and in Scotland in particular – due to the serried ranks of them you often see marching up hillsides all over the highlands and lowlands. The stuff grown here as a crop has limited uses – wood pulp and the raw material for the OSB mills. It’s occasionally used for contruction but UK-sourced trees are too soft and open-grained so struggle to make the basic C16 grade used in house building. However, when grown in the Pacific North West in North America it’s a completely different looking timber – tight growth rings, light and strong – good enough to be used in high-end boatbuilding projects. Back in the day it was a mainstay wood for aircraft production. It’s straight-grain, lightness and strength are prized characteristics.
(Above) Quarter sawn sitka spruce: some of the straightest boards with zero defects and the tightest grain I’ve ever used. They were also, by a comfortable margin, some of the most expensive boards (by unit volume) I’ve ever bought. Of North American origin – Alaska, I think, if I correctly interpreted the mill markings that were stamped on the end of one of the boards.
(Above) The sitka spruce was used to make a pair of 2.9m hollow sculling oars with a ‘Macon’ blade. Each oar weighs just 2kgs but are enormously strong, robust and make sculling a delight. (FYI. Carbon fibre sculling oars come in at round 1.6kg each.)
So let’s not be too down on sitka spruce! It can be a bit of an unattractive, useless weed in the UK context but it does have incredible utility when grown in the correct context. Here endeth the lesson.
(Above) Circa 1000m . Gratuitous extra shot of the view down into Coire Ardair from the broad ridge between Sron a Ghoire and Puist Coire Ardair.
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roger clare
9th February 2025 8:57 pm
Thanks for a most interesting digression in defence of the Sitka Spruce!
Stuart Manson
10th February 2025 9:39 am
Thanks for the interesting post. It would be good to see how that Sitka spruce looks if it gets the chance to grow to full maturity, that will unfortunately be well past my lifetime, but hopefully some folks will get the chance to sit in its shade on a warm summer climb one day.
meagaidhadmin
10th February 2025 12:50 pm
Thanks for your comment, Stuart.
As you say, it will take some time before the tree could cast a shadow of any significant size.
Bimbling
11th February 2025 8:48 pm
Nice article about Sitka spruce. It is, like rhododendron, laurel and others an invasive non-native. The 2020 BSBI Plant Altas 2020 summing 20 years of study and comparing current plant range and populations with the 1950s shows that “Sitka spruce had the greatest estimated expansion of range of any species covered by the Plant Atlas 2020 Project.” Clearly a lot of that will be plantation forestry but its spread and colonising of peatland, moorland and mountain environments is a cause of concern.
I pull’em out whenever I can, sometimes even as the Polis might say ‘going equipped’