Where the Forest Stops

The tree line is not a line but a band. Coming up from below, the stand first thins, then shortens, then bends. The last trees stand alone, often crouched, with branches on one side only – the side away from the wind. You can read the direction the weather comes from off their shape, without anyone having to tell you.

The height at which this happens differs from range to range, and it does not depend on altitude alone: the steepness of the slope, the way it faces the sun, how long the snow stays, how often livestock has been through. That is why the edge on the sunny side of a valley sits differently than it does a little way across in the shade. Fly a drone over such a valley and both edges are in the same frame.

Higher up it does not get empty, only smaller. What grows here grows flat: cushions, mats, lichen on rock, plants that pack their entire flowering into a few weeks because there is no more time than that. Animals live in between that you rarely get to see from below – and that are hard to film, because there is no cover. You cannot get closer without being seen.

That is precisely what makes these elevations fragile. A habitat without cover has no buffer either. A snow cover that goes early shifts the flowering; a track someone drags across a field of cushion plants is still visible the following summer. So we keep our distance and accept the worse picture.

We come back to the same slopes several times a year, in early summer and again before the first snow settles for good. Only the comparison shows what a single visit never can: which surfaces lose their snow first, where the wind piles it up, which of the solitary trees made it through the winter and which one is merely still standing. One picture of a place is a postcard. Three pictures of the same place are a beginning.