A guide for exploring mountain larches this fall

They look ever so much like candles at dusk, the larches that decorate the high country of the Pacific Northwest in autumn. And, as candles do, they light up and burn out in finite periods, making their season just a couple months at most. Luckily, it’s mid-September to early November, perhaps the finest six weeks in the high country.

That’s where I most memorably encountered these magnificent trees, in a remote wilderness timberline lake basin in British Columbia just above the U.S. border. We were at about 7,000 feet, camped beneath 9,000-foot pinnacles, my wilderness buddy David and me. Aside from scraggly alpine firs, the only trees were larches – and what amazing trees they were in this rocky, rugged environment.

Lean, shapely spires that seemed like dancers ready to twirl, they evinced grace and elegance in every way. It was late September, winter lurked behind the ridgelines above, and the larches had just donned the butterscotch hue their needles adopt before dropping in October or November. They are the only deciduous conifer that sport a color change in autumn – thus comprising almost the entire fall finery fling in the Northwest high country, save random blueberry patches.

Larches are good for other things than visual admiration, too. One had come down years ago in a winter storm about 20 yards from camp, and it proved to be the best timberline wood ever for the evening fire over which we grilled the golden trout we’d caught that day.

I mentioned this to David as dusk dropped and we were mesmerized by the clear topaz flames.

“Maybe you should pack some up to take home,” he suggested.

Well, no. Our journey here had been nine miles up and down steep sawback ridges with huge, mind-twisting exposure, and some experiences are best left to savor right where you find them. Thus, my fond regard for larches, which are neither numerous nor as conspicuously flamboyant as the famous autumn-color trees of the East Coast. Drive the Maine shore in early October and your eyes may literally wince at the shocking vermilion and tangerine colors of the maples and other deciduous trees standing almost everywhere, like on township streets just down the road from Walmart. No such ubiquity attends to western larches, our trees, but their relative rarity helps make them all the more memorable.

Of our two species, western and alpine, more people are familiar with the first, which is found from about 2,000 feet up past 5,000. Alpine larches, the kind we admired in B.C., take over above their larger and more common cousins up to timberline.

Both trees sport a marvelous palette for months.

In spring, they seem almost painterly in soft emerald foliage as their needles emerge and lengthen. Through summer, larches are a brighter viridescent green than the pines and firs they share the mountains with, and in autumn the saffron glow of their dying, soon-shed needles stands out distinctly within the surrounding forests. A mid-elevation pine/fir forest with larches sprinkled throughout is one of America’s most distinctive autumn landscape sights, tall butterscotch beacons shining out like lighthouse beams.

They are shapely trees, too; tall and narrow like obelisks in the woods. Inveterate tree-gawkers such as me can often pick them out from a near distance simply by their statuesque form. They are the Audrey Hepburns of intermountain woodlands, except for a few grandfather trees in favorable sites that reach 200 feet in height and may be 5 feet in diameter. Larch wood is denser and stronger than most other Northwest mountain trees, and makes superb lumber and firewood. The trees are more fire-resistant than their neighboring lodgepole pines and subalpine firs.

All the above virtues describe alpine larch, at reduced scale, with the added bonus that some older trees are multi-trunked, high mountain kings whose crowns have spread out a bit into sprays of feathery foliage.

Both types are among the very few conifers that shed their needles each fall, and in winter their leafless forms may look dead until you carefully study the lively, thin bark whose amber hue signifies years – decades – ahead and behind. Some Montana larches are a half-millennium old.

They are thus exceptional trees all around, and their character marks them as our own special autumn treasure. Yes, vine maples, black cottonwoods, rainforest dogwoods and dryland aspens all color up too. But only larches stand out amid the coniferous woodlands that occupy so much of the Northwest’s mountains. And in the high country, it’s just larches, period.

“Those who have come to know it [alpine larch] will long remember how its golden color highlights the high country at the close of summer,” wrote Stephen F. Arno in his definitive Northwest Trees guide, “how old lumpy larch limbs crackle in a mountain campfire, and how a soft breeze stirs the wispy boughs overhead, setting them in motion across a background of starlight.”

I’ve never been back to that awesome timberline lake in B.C., but I have ever since kept my eyes open for larches wherever I go in the Northwest, a geographic term that almost exactly matches the distribution of alpine larches.

In times like these, to borrow a phrase from Dave Grohl, “exclusive” is a word so digitally deflated that it’s almost nonsense. It’s a vast universe; few things are actually exclusive.

But if you want to trek to a high-country basin and make camp amid the most wonderful alpine trees of all, you cannot do that east of the Mississippi, nor even east of the Continental Divide. You can’t even do it south of the Snake River. Western larches are more numerous, but still mostly trees of the coastal and inland Northwest. These are our trees, in other words. I spent the first 20 years of my outdoor life in the West traipsing the Colorado and New Mexico high country in the September time I favor – marvelous landscapes, but no shining butterscotch larches.

Almost any hike near timberline in the high country of the North Cascades, Selkirks and mountains of extreme southern B.C. will bring you to alpine larch territory. Cathedral Provincial Park, the Pasayten Wilderness and Glacier Peak Wilderness all hold these awesome trees, mostly on the east side of the Cascade divide. Cascade Pass is one such hike.

But you need not throw pack on back to spy western larches, which are easy to see on many highway passes through the Cascade Range, including the North Cascades Highway, Stevens Pass, Satus Pass and Blewett Pass. Look for golden candles in the dark autumn woods, and treasure this unique, exclusive homegrown marvel of Northwest nature.

Eric Lucas lives on a small farm on San Juan Island, where he grows organic hay, beans, corn, squash and apples.

This article was first published in Mount Baker Experience, a quarterly outdoor magazine from Point Roberts Press, which publishes The Northern Light.