The summit of Darland Mountain is nothing special compared to other classic Cascades’ peaks. No crags, cliffs, or steep rocky parts, it’s flat and open and hard to distinguish the actual high point. You can reach it by hiking or cross country skiing but when I visited it, on a warm September day, I arrived in a truck, bouncing along a 4wd road that crossed over Darland. The road, at least, is unusual because it’s the second highest in the state, reaching to 6,981 feet. I first learned about Darland from its biggest fan, the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. (He referred to it as Darling though no one knows why the name changed.) As a young man in the 1910s, Douglas hiked and camped throughout this part of the Cascades, east of Yakima, where he grew up. In his splendid memoir, Of Men and Mountains, he wrote of the summit of Darland: “This is without a doubt the most commanding view in the Cascades.” Heady words for such a low-key summit but as Douglas pointed out, to the east lay the golden brown valleys around Yakima; to the south, in Oregon, Mount Jefferson and Mount Hood; to the west, rose Mount Adams and Mount St. Helens, in Douglas’ day, a perfectly conical peak; and north of Adams, the jagged Goat Rocks and mighty Rainier. Growing on the slopes of Darland, wrote Douglas, were rich gardens of plants: lupine, penstemon, scarlet gilia, saxifrage, gentian, larkspur, mission bells, tiger lily, monkshood, arnica, Jacobs-ladder, St. Johns wort, wallflower, mallow, paintbrush, valerian, cinquefoil, and a “host of others.” On the summit, he found his favorite, the splendid avalanche lily; “it’s stimulus is the raw wind, cold thin earth, chill nights, and icy waters of the Cascades.” After reading Douglas’ book I had wanted to see the summit and had the opportunity when I tagged along with two researchers from Central Washington University, Dr. Ali Scoville and her student Jenna Chapman. They were here to study Clark’s Nutcrackers, a handsome gray bird with black wings and prominent bill. Well known to many visitors to the Cascades as camp robbers, the birds are smart, resourceful, and inquisitive, and central to one of the most enduring and important ecological relationships in the Cascades As Douglas noted from his time on Darland, nutcrackers relish the nuts of the summit’s most distinctive tree, whitebark pine. The nutcrackers were “feverishly tearing the cones apart for the seed…work[ing] the tops of the trees.” The pines reminded him of “the wind-blown trees that the Knights of the Round Table, according to Tennyson, looked for among the crags.” I know not of what these fine, medieval gentlemen sought but think that whitebarks are one of the loveliest trees in the Cascades. They are also one of the most overlooked, losing out to the big trees below, which grab all the attention and far more of the visitors. But those who venture higher are rewarded in seeing what ecologists such as Ali call a keystone and a foundational species of the heights. By providing food, water, and nesting sites for other species, the impact of whitebark pines is essential to the community health of the ecosystem. Because of them, numerous plants and animals have been able to colonize and thrive, often after the ecosystem has been disturbed. Without whitebark pines, the high elevations of the Cascades, particularly east of the divide—as well as large swaths of the Rocky Mountains—would be far less diverse, and because this ecosystem crowns the mountains, the effects spread down mountain multiplying the importance of the trees. We first encountered whitebarks about 2,000 feet lower, as we ascended the Middle Fork Ahtanum Creek valley. I was immediately taken with the architecture of multiple arms, skirting up to form a broad crown, so unlike the surrounding subalpine firs and their classic arrowhead shape. The arms mimicked the base of many whitebarks, which consisted of several trunks sprouting next to each other, like what happens in a garden when you sew too many seeds together. In fact, this is what occurs with whitebark pines. Not only do Clark’s Nutcracker relish whitebark cones, but they are also the principal disperser of the trees’ nuts, or seeds, which is the key to the relationship between the species. After harvesting nuts, which they store in a pouch under their tongue, the birds fly (hundreds of yards up to 18 miles) from their source and bury, or plant, the seeds. They do so by excavating a shallow trench with a side-to-side bill sweep, depositing the nuts, and then covering the trench with pebble, twigs, and other debris. A typical cache contains one to five seeds. When the seeds germinate, they often do so en masse and generate several, close-growing, fused or contiguous trunks, again so different from the typical shape of most other Cascade trees. At the summit, the whitebark pine further stood out, primarily because a lightning strike-caused fire burned 4,000 acres on the top of Darland in August 2009. The trees’ multiple stems and many branches, crisp, bleached, and stark, created a forest of ghosts, beautiful yet ominous against the crystalline blue sky and backdrop of Mt. Adams. Unfortunately, wholesale deaths such as this might be the future for whitebark pines, in part because of fire but also because of disease, the outbreak of mountain pine beetles, and climate change. If whitebark populations continue to suffer, the effects will also spread to Clark’s nutcrackers, resulting in the complete rejiggering of this high-altitude ecosystem. “If we can understand why this change is occurring, then maybe we can do something about it,” says Ali. Ali’s words exemplify one of the central themes of my book In the Range of Fire and Ice: the importance of research and better understanding the life histories of the plants and animals of the Cascades and how this can lead to better management. This stands out most clearly with Mount St. Helens where the concepts of ecological succession—the process of plants and animals replacing another species over time, such as in a disturbed habitat—were completely rewritten. This in turn has had significant implications for land management around the globe, all due to what scientists learned at the volcano. Other areas in which more research is helping include management of fire (on both sides of the Cascades), carnivores, such as wolverines and wolves, and whitebark pines. Not only do many of these studies rely on new research but also on what is known as TEK, or Traditional Ecological Knowledge. This is knowledge obtained through observation and experience gleaned from living on and in place for generations. Such knowledge, practices, and beliefs may be held in stories, legends, myth, and place names, as well as simply being passed down from elders. Long disparaged by non-Native scientists, TEK is becoming more and more widely accepted by researchers, who have begun to realize the limitations of what is often described as Western science and to acknowledge that there is more than one way to learn about and from plants and animals. None of the new and shared knowledge guarantees either good management or long term stewardship but it does, at least, point in a better direction and a way to a better future for humans and the more-than-human world. I can only hope that such ideas continue to spread as more and more people continue to take a saner, long term, science-based approach to preserving, conserving, and managing the precious ecosystems that we call home. November 5, 2026 - Kingfisher Books - Coupeville, Whidbey Island - 5:30 PM - I will be discussing In the Range of Fire and Ice. RSVP for event. Get full access to Street Smart Naturalist: Explorations of the Urban Kind at streetsmartnaturalist.substack.com/subscribe
