Short and gnarled, these trees have a little skirt of horizontal branches that flare out at their bases.
This form of growth is what botanists call krummholz, which means “crooked wood” in German. In our western mountains, the white fir and Engelmann spruce that live near the tree line stand only chest high.
But they’re still full-grown trees! Individuals that are shorter than your ski pole have been aged at 150 years old.
I love the krummholz zone, especially in a fog, when ghostly droplets of mist snag onto branch tips. I always expect to meet a gnome or an elf there. Maybe that’s why these forests are called "elfinwood."
What shapes these trees? The buildup of ice repeatedly kills the growing tips. Strong mountaintop winds shear off the uppermost branches. And trees invest in strong horizontal branches instead of vertical growth to support their heavy snow loads.
Our warming climate is not only shortening our ski season, it’s also shifting krummholz trees lower down our mountain slopes.
Krummholz literally live on the edge, growing in places where they can barely get enough resources to stay alive.
Even though they look stunted and misshapen, the unique form they’ve evolved lets them thrive even under the harshest of conditions.
