Crystal's Vanishing Alpine

One of my dad's friends lent me a copy of Crystal Mountain's original stock prospectus published in November 1958.  The prospectus contains some interesting pictures.  Here is a photo showing East Peak and Bullion Basin from the west.  Notice how bare of trees the slopes of East Peak are.  The proposed chairs in Bullion Basin are pretty interesting too.



I don't have any recent pictures from this viewpoint, but I think regular Crystal skiers will recognize the change in tree cover.  It's pretty remarkable.

I doubt we can blame this on global warming.  I suspect there was a fire on the peak early in the century and the trees have been growing back since then.  I'm sure the picture was taken during a good snow year, but even a record year today would not look like this.

Here's another picture looking up Silver Creek from the north.  The east side of the valley has far less tree cover than today.  I think the west side has grown up a lot too.

www.alpenglow.org/misc/2006/cm-prospectus-p4.jpg

That's amazing, Lowell.<br>I find the area marked "cabins" just south of the Elizabeth Slope interesting. It appears to me to be the area where the water tank is now. Does the prospectus mention rental cabins or the like in that area?<br>I know there were cabins earlier in the century at Jim Town (I've see the remains of them on recon hikes) but I think that was further up the creek (south) from the "cabins" area of the picture.

Does the prospectus mention rental cabins or the like in that area?

<br><br>I don't see any mention of cabins while skimming the prospectus. I think they built homes right above the cabin site shown in the photo. In the 1960s they had a small ski jump in that area. We have home movies of my brother Gordy jumping on that hill in about 1964.<br>

That is quite a transformation, even compared to a decade later when I started spending a lot of time in that area - I too remember jumping on that hill (on alpine skis, and I think I remember Gordy being there) and wandering through what I felt were thick forests (around the Black Tusk condos) at the time . . .

After cogitating about it a little more, I think the transformation may not be as dramatic as the pictures make it look.<br><br>There's another picture in the prospectus that shows a partly cloudy skiers-eye view of East Peak from near lower Bull Run. This view looks more like what we're used to, although there were definitely fewer trees back then. I think we'd need an aerial perspective to really compare then and now.<br><br>Also, my notes indicate that 1956 was a record snow year in some parts of the Cascades. I wonder if those aerial pictures were taken in 1956.<br><br>I remember some slides by Charles Hessey, Jr. that also showed fewer trees in the 1950s. I think the trees are definitely moving in at Crystal (and at other places, like Paradise), but maybe not as dramatically as it appears in these pictures.<br>

<br>Although I've never taken any Forestry classes, I do remember reading in Franklin & Dyrness' "Natural Vegetation of Oregon & Washington" that several of the subalpine meadows on Mt Rainier & in the Cascades in general were experiencing an encroachment by Subalpine Firs (page 282 in my version)..