A pullout among pinyon and juniper shows how slowly life moves in this desert. Junipers here can reach 700 years, shutting down branches to survive dry spells. The dark crust on the sand is a living community, easily broken by a single step and slow to recover, so visitors stay on rock or pavement.
How old is that tree? Pick one of the small twisted ones on the side away from the big wall, junipers and pinyon pines, and guess. Go higher. A juniper can live seven hundred years. When water runs short it cuts off nutrients to some of its branches to save the tree, which is why a living one can look half dead. Most of the tree is out of sight, too. The roots can make up two thirds of its mass, with a taproot twenty-five feet down. Down at your feet, a knobby black crust on the sand is alive. It's mostly cyanobacteria, and on the Colorado Plateau it can make up seventy to eighty percent of the living ground cover. Don't bust the crust. Keep to the pavement and bare rock here, and walk a wash only with no storm about. One footprint lasts. Under the best conditions a thin veneer may return in five to seven years. Deeper damage can take up to fifty years of growth, and some ground never fully recovers.
Photo: Famartin / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0