Plants
The botanical wealth of the Klamath-Siskiyou is not limited
to its serpentine specialists. The very
last North American tree species to be described by botanists was the Brewer’s
Spruce, which is found nowhere else on earth but in the Klamath-Siskiyou. The region is home to one of the greatest
assemblages of conifer species on the planet, with 30 species overall and an
amazing 17 species within one square mile in the Russian Wilderness. Many of the conifers, as well as other plant
species, reach their range limits here.
For example, the region is home to the northernmost Coast Redwoods, the
southernmost Alaska yellow
cedar, and the westernmost Western
Juniper. These species have responded to
changing conditions by withdrawing their principal ranges to more hospitable
climes, leaving behind remnant populations in protected pockets of the
mountains of paradox.
Other plants, notably the magnificent Port Orford Cedar, are
relict species. They survive only in the
Klamath-Siskiyou today, but millions of years ago were much more widespread, as
revealed by their scattered fossils. This long ebb and flow has filled the
Klamath-Siskiyou with the rich pool of life that we recognize today as one of
the world’s treasuries of biodiversity.
The diversity of plant communities
in the region is also extraordinary, reflecting the complex array of soil
types, elevations, exposures, and microclimates that create a dizzying mosaic
of life. In summing up his years of
field research in the Klamath-Siskiyou, the eminent plant ecologist Robert
Whittaker wrote: “The region possesses a
greater diversity of forest communities, in a more complex vegetation pattern,
than any comparable area of the West. . . [It is] as dramatic an expression of
relations of natural communities to geological formations as is to be found
anywhere in the world.”
Animals
Any landscape that is home to three hundred foot tall
redwoods and foot-long giant salamanders is plainly capable of breeding
monsters, and this fecundity may help to explain the persistent shadow of
bigfoot that lies across the Klamath-Siskiyou.
As David Rains Wallace eloquently explored in The Klamath Knot, bigfoot inhabits a special space in the life of
the region, somewhere between mythology
and ecology, a fitting distillation of the unease that the mountains of paradox
can create in the human mind: “They lure
us into the wilderness, as they lured me, not to devour us but to remind us
where we are, on a living planet.”
