Oldest living Colorado blue spruce finds a home in Utah
The Colorado blue spruce was named Colorado’s state tree in 1939. When it was discovered the oldest living blue spruce was actually in Utah, researchers were surprised to say the least.
Standing just outside Cedar City at Cedar Breaks National Monument, “Old Blue,” a nickname from its discoverers, is estimated to be 457 years old.
In the summers, students, volunteers and field crews go out and survey trees for Utah State University.
Old Blue’s discovery was completely accidental. USU forest ecology professor Jim Lutz explained how the tree was discovered by random tree-ring sampling.
“It just looks like a tree. It’s not even very big. A lot of times, old trees just get fat. They might not be tall, so it was just one of the ones we sampled and we checked,” Lutz said. “We think it’s really good that this is the Colorado state tree and Utah has got the oldest one.”
Despite being named Old Blue, there actually appears to be very little blue in this species of trees.
”They’re called blue spruce because they can look blue, but most of the natural ones in Utah are mostly green,” Lutz said.
Old Blue appeared to be “hiding among Engelmann spruce,” according to an academic article by Lutz with fellow contributors Joseph Birch and Justin DeRose. Its age is a telling sign of how its presence has affected the health of the forest.
“It may be advantageous to plant some blue spruce when restoring an Engelmann spruce forest. Blue spruce are more resistant to beetle attacks and have similar climate requirements,” the article states.
Lutz’s recent research has been covering the impacts of climate change in forestry specifically, such as Utah’s susceptibility to droughts. Most trees have grown to withstand Utah’s temperatures even with ongoing climate change, but they are extremely sensitive to droughts, according to Lutz. Old Blue provided much insight to this research.
”Old trees give us information on how much they’ve grown, so they’re really important for understanding past climate or past forest conditions, but old trees are also survivors,” Lutz said. “We assume their genetics are good because they’ve had to go through all these hard times in the past. If we can identify the old — doesn’t have to be the oldest — trees, then maybe they have good genetics and their seeds would be things we want to collect and propagate.”
Lutz has been researching how warmer temperatures are affecting trees due to an insect called the bark beetle. Warmer temperatures have led to an increase in the population of this particular beetle and an outbreak that’s killed a lot of trees, but the Colorado blue spruce species remains insusceptible, thus making it a tree to keep an eye on as it could become more dominant in Utah as conditions shift.
The whole team behind Old Blue’s discovery was elated to have the oldest Colorado blue spruce ironically be discovered in Utah.
“We need to talk some serious smack to those forestry people at Colorado State,” Lutz said.