Tundra comes from a Finnish word meaning treeless plain. The isolated patches of alpine trees that grow at the border of forest and tundra are called krumholz. Becky taught me that. I glimpse trees first from the top of a little bump of a hill studded with boulders. When the trail wanders down again, I lose sight of them until, after a few miles of flat steady walking, the trail begins to slope gradually downhill. The river line gleams to the left. Creeks flow out to join it from each fold in the mountains. When I reach the first spruce clump, I see that there is a parent tree inside a circle of smaller trees: clones sprouted from the original tree’s branches, which must have sunk into the moss and leaf litter under heavy snows some longago winter. Black spruce reproduces this way in the Far North; so do trembling aspen. Aspen seeds die so fast when they leave the parent tree and need such specific conditions to germinate that they rarely travel up here. You can tell clones because they’re all somehow still connected.
