EACH summer families drive from South Dakota's plains into the Black Hills, thick with ponderosa pines.
The trees are so dense that, unable to compete with one another, they succumb to disease and bark beetles.When a fire hits one of these tinderboxes, it burns to the ground with temperatures so hot that the soil is sterilised, killing the seed of the ponderosa pines and native grasses.
It so happens that his tribe's land is exceptional: the Salt River Canyon is as beautiful as the Grand Canyon, but without the tourists, and above it stretch endless forests of ponderosa pines.
Some forests in the south-west and along the Sierra Nevada, dominated by ponderosa pine trees, are evolutionarily adapted to survive frequent fires.
In Montana the 92,000-acre (38,000 hectares) Bundy Railroad fire forced firefighters to retreat three times in the face of high winds that fanned burning stands of dried grass, sagebrush and ponderosa pines.
Higher elevations are cool and temperate, with stands of lodgepole, ponderosa, and Jeffrey pines.
On the North Rim, which receives 26 inches (660 mm) of precipitation annually, are magnificent forest communities of ponderosa pine, white and Douglas fir, blue spruce, and aspen.
On the eastern slopes of the Cascades, ponderosa pines are the major trees, because they are capable of thriving on the drier slopes where fire is not uncommon.
On the Blue-Wallowa mountains and the eastern slopes of the Cascades occur great stands of ponderosa pine in association with ground coverings of bitter brush, green manzanita, and herbaceous plants.
In the eastern two-thirds of the state, ponderosa pine, large sagebrush, and western juniper predominate, along with various annual grasses and wildflowers.
"Tree-ring studies done on petrified wood from Utah reveal six-inch-long fossilized teeth of the Megalodon, the largest shark in the history of the earth, embedded in the trunks of ponderosa-pine trees more than three hundred thousand years old — trees that lived a thousand miles from the nearest ocean!
