UDescription:
The Douglas-fir is one of a handful of conifers that can be located along the immediate coastline as well as many areas well inland. It is found throughout the west at sea level to over 10,000’ elevation. Consequently it associates with a very wide variety of trees, including Redwood on the California coast, ponderosa pine in the Sierra Nevada, limber pine in the Rockies, and Engelmann spruce in the high desert mountain ranges of eastern Oregon and eastern Nevada.
Throughout history is has been classified as a pine, fir, and spruce, but it has found its own genus – Pseudotsuga, which can be translated to “false hemlock” to further confuse it taxonomy. There is only one other species in the genus in North America – the Bigcone Douglas-fir, which occurs in southern California. There are a few others in the genus in Asia.
It is one of the tallest trees in the world. Some say that some of them many years ago may have rivaled the redwood, currently the tallest tree on earth, in height. The needles spread out in all directions from the stem, and are fairly soft, not prickly like a similar looking spruce.
One of the most distinquishing features of the Douglas-fir is the “three-fingured” bracts that estrude from the cone scales. The cones dangle downwards from the branches. They seem to grow equally well in the coastal rainforests and some of the drier high desert mountains.
Personal Observations:
I have found this conifer in many of my hikes and adventures throughout the western half of the country, including the west coast, the Cascades and Sierra Nevada, as well as in high desert mountains of eastern Oregon and eastern Nevada. Being a northern Californian up until last year, in my younger years, it was hard not to spot the tree if you were trekking through almost any forest. So, I won’t discuss the ubiquitous tree in those areas, I’ll stick to some of its more remote locations.
While backpacking through the Mount Moriah Wilderness Area in eastern Nevada, I spotted on at an unusually high elevation, around 10,000 feet. Although there have been a few reported at slightly higher altitudes, this one is certainly one of its highest know locations. The ones I spotted there were of the variety “glauca” within the Pseudotsuga menziesii species. It also graced the mid-elevation slopes of the nearby Great Basin National Park one September as I camped in an early-season snowstorm.
The other variety of the species – “menziesii” is much more rare in Nevada, in fact there is only one reported in the whole state. It took me many hours to find it. It is an old one, perhaps over a hundred years old, located near the east shore of Lake Tahoe. I did not see any seedlings, nor other Douglas-firs after a very exhaustive search throughout the area. It might be the last of its kind in the area. I suspect most of its kind were logged decades or longer ago.
Other than the desert mountain ranges of Nevada, I found it in the ranges of eastern Oregon, particularly the Strawberry and Mill Creek Wilderness Areas. Also, a little to the west of there, where the high desert meets the Cascades, it can be found in the wetter areas. I located them at fairly low elevations, around 3500’ in Shevlin Park, outside of Bend, Oregon, and a little to the north of there, near Camp Sherman at 3000’ as well as Metolius Preserve. I also found an isolated small population on Grizzly Peak northeast of Redmond.