Wonderful pictures of a couple of my favorite conifers! I didn't know about Bumpass Hell, and I'm not sure how to pronounce it. Bum-pass?

I especially like the third photo; that's a really venerable T. mertensiana.

Your 5-needle pine looks like P. albicaulis, whitebark pine, to me. The yellow coloring is nice.

-m

Nice mertensianas!

Ditto to Whitebark Pine; probably a nutrient deficiency.

Resin

probably a nutrient deficiency

==>>> maybe.. probably if resin says so ...

but why dont you go back and harvest some scion and have it grafted.. and find out ...

if you cant do it.. i am sure we can find someone who will do it for you ..

in my uneducated thinking [i mean, really now.. i am not a dr of dna .. lol] ... i always wonder.. if the soil is so deficient... why the tree didnt fail as a babe ... when it was a seedling ???? .. i wonder about all kinds of weird things.. lol ...

ken

Hey Ken, good idea! I'll grab a plane after lunch, rent a car and hike 2 or 3 miles up the mountain and head back home to have customs take it all away! ;o). Honestly, I would go back in a heartbeat if I could, I really love the southwest, but someone will have to get there instead of me. I too ask myself some weird questions from time to time and I think your hypothesis is just as valuable as any but I won't be the one to prove it because dr.dna is just an old nickname!

Any chance that massive mertensiana is actually heterophylla? I find their ranges overlap and some of the biggest here seems almost intermediate between the two.

Now looking at foliage it definitely isn't heterophylla!