North Coast's pygmy forests have an aura of enchantment

In the summer of 1956, a small team drove up from Anaheim into the pygmy forest east of the village of Mendocino. They were on a mission: to bring back specimens of the rare miniature trees that grew there.

With the help of a state park ranger, Walt Disney’s crew carefully extracted an ancient, gnarled pygmy Bolander Pine, drove home and transplanted it in the new dwarf forest Walt was creating for Snow White in Storybook Land. There, to everyone’s surprise, it reportedly resuscitated and began to grow toward its full natural height, ?10 stories tall.

Hidden within a long, narrow strip of the westernmost coastal hills of Mendocino and Sonoma counties, the pygmy forests still have an aura of enchantment today. They are inhabited by stands of rare wispy pine and cypress trees, some more than a 100 years old, but still as thin as broom handles and barely as tall as a standing adult.

The stunted trees live in a realm of their own, an ecological niche of white bleached soil and lichens, awash in sunlight, an eerie oasis surrounded by dense forests of towering redwoods and firs.

After nearly a century of study, the mystery of why they only grow here, and stay so small, is still being unraveled, although a handful of dedicated investigators have been steadily collecting the clues.

When people come to study the pygmy forests, the expert everyone calls is Teresa Sholars, a trim, energetic local ecologist, who obliges with personal tours, encyclopedic knowledge and an educator’s passion for her chosen subject.

Now an emeritus professor, Sholars was 21 when she first encountered the pygmies with her botanist husband, Robert. Coming to Mendocino in the ’70s, they fell in with a colorful Swiss researcher who was commuting from UC Berkeley, Hans Jenny.

Jenny, the top soil scientist in America and internationally renowned, was trying to understand the unusual earths of the pygmy region, and fighting to rally protection for their globally unique ecology.

Teresa spent the next 40 years studying the forests, and working to preserve them, first with her husband, and after his death, as a professor and an expert with environmental, native plant and community groups.

The first clue to the pygmy mystery, and the one Jenny uncovered, is buried underfoot. Drive along winding Highway 1 near Mendocino and in places you’ll find yourself on a flat straightaway. To the west, the flat coastal plain drops off a cliff into the blue Pacific, and to the east, a rank of forested hills climb, one above the other, 1,000 feet or so.

It’s not obvious from the car, but if you walk up into those hills it’s possible to see they’re actually a series of relatively flat platforms, separated by fairly steep slopes - a giant staircase - all the way down to the sea.

On the staircase, under carpets of redwood forest, tan oak groves, huckleberries, ferns and soil, Jenny and other investigators discovered ancient sand dunes, and then seabed. The platforms weren’t hills, but a series of marine terraces, giant flat slabs of wave-cut sandstone from the ocean floor.

The individual steps were carved by the high sea levels between Ice Ages, and then left exposed when the ice returned, lowering the sea level again. When sea levels were low, cliff faces were cut in the seaward edge of the exposed flat platforms by the Pacific surf, and then the steps were preserved, one after the other, as the entire coastline was pushed up over time by tectonic forces.

The time gap between Ice Ages and the formation of each terrace was about 100,000 years, and as a result, each step on the staircase is 100,000 years older than the one below it. And at the top, beneath the Mendocino pygmy forests on the fifth terrace, the ground is half a million years old or more.

The hike up the staircase from the beach bluffs is a moderate climb, and Sholars recalls, back when she was doing her dissertation and taking core samples at the top, they would ride there on horseback. The trail climbs through a succession of ecologies from step to step, including crane-your-neck tall groves of redwoods and firs, with trunks as wide as cars, before emerging onto the brightly exposed pygmy plateau.

“Locals like the pygmy forests” she said, “because they’re sunny, and you get a break from the perpetual shade of the woods.”

The transition to the short, spindly trees is dramatic. What makes these ancient terraces so unusual is that over the millennia they were uplifted flat, not tilted or fractured, and against all odds, have remained both intact and level to this day. As a result, their surfaces have sat exposed to thousands of centuries of weather. So long, in fact, that the oldest soil, at the top, has now been leached of nearly all nutrients.

And the soil is not only nearly infertile, it has become as acidic as vinegar, and has formed a shallow layer of concrete-like hardpan that’s impervious to water. It was this extreme weathered soil, Jenny suspected, that shaped the pygmy life that grew on it. By earth’s standards, the soil is extremely inhospitable, more like an alien environment.

Only a handful of living things manage to grow here, a select, small community of plants that have adapted to conditions at the very edge of life. How they do it still isn’t fully understood. But those that survive, are terribly stunted.

And if the trees are placed in fertile soil, like the Bolander Pygmy in Disneyland, they begin to grow normally again.

Sholars agrees that for the average visitor, calling these special places “forests” can be misleading. For one thing, the trees aren’t photogenic, and given their size, it may be hard to see them as trees at all. More than one reviewer on social media has expressed disappointment. But others see the magic of the place.

In the realm of the pygmy cypress and Bolander pines, with their thin trunks, spare branches dressed in lacy grey-green lichens, meager needles and scaly grey bark, it takes a conscious effort to remember that some have been growing here since Woodrow Wilson was president.

And some are species so adapted to their unique environment, that they grow nowhere in the world but here.

As mysterious as the trees may be, the true marvel of the place may be something else: the chance to walk deep into time, and stand on earth that was here before our species had even evolved and departed Africa.

That’s a ride even Walt Disney couldn’t design.

Stephen Nett is a Bodega Bay-based certified California naturalist, writer and speaker. Contact him at snett@californiasparks.com.