After an exhausting, all-night session of air guitar solos, i was on my way, and left Rush behind. Recently i had seen an excellent vacation documentary called Long Way Round. It was an account of a motorcycle journey made by actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman as they traveled around the world from England to New York riding through Mongolia and Siberia along the way. The landscape i was passing through that morning was very similar to the Taiga along the Road of Bones in Siberia.
Taiga means "land of little sticks" and this northern area of the Boreal Forest indeed was made up mostly of skinny trees with patches of birch here and there. The trees could be hundreds of years old, but no thicker than 5 or 6 inches because of the extremely short growing season. When i was younger i used to confuse the word Taiga with Tundra, and i didn't know what the difference was. Even in recent years living up here i've been a little confused about it and i guess it's because Alaska is right between Siberia, where they call it Taiga, and Canada, where they call it the Boreal Forest. The Boreal Forest itself is the largest forest on Earth, but as you travel farther north the variety of trees steadily diminishes until there is virtually nothing left but rather unattractive Black Spruce. It's this far northern, uniform area of trees that i would personally call Taiga.
Eventually i began passing through long stretches of burnt forest and huge pink fields of fireweed. I never knew exactly how fireweed got it's name but it soon became totally obvious that the plant grows like a colonizing weed after a fire burns everything down. 2004 was a record fire year for Alaska. Fires burned down 6.7 million acres, an area the size of the state of Massachusetts. Then the very next year some more fires burned down an additional 4.4 million acres. Together that's around the same size as Maryland and Connecticut combined. Summer of 2007 was just two years later and fireweed was everywhere, covering entire valleys and hillsides in some areas.
I'm told this is some kind of invasive species.
Fortunately for me, the charred landscape made it easy to spot tors, big piles of granite stones that littered the hills. Tors are leftover from when magma seeped into cracks in the bedrock and froze into granite. Later water seeped into new cracks, froze and created ice wedges that cracked apart the softer surrounding rocks. The elements eventually carried the softer stuff away leaving exposed, weathered knobs of granite sticking up all over the place. If the fires hadn't gone through it could have been a lot harder to see them or get to them from the road.
I was going to climb up this Tor but was driven away by large, vicious nesting birds. They harrased me for 20 minutes and followed me about a hundred yards back to my car.
The Tors i saw all seemed 20 to 50 feet high.
