Whitebark Pine: An Education in Trees

by Claire Cella

I followed in the skin track of Aaron Diamond off Teton Pass west of Jackson, Wyoming. We were traveling to a ski objective under a bright-blue awning of a sky that day in 2023, but to say the afternoon unfolded like others I’ve had outdoors would be a lie. Diamond revealed an intriguing demeanor in the winter woods, stopping often to point out how a majestic whitebark pine arced its twisted trunk from the pillowed snow, or how, with a closer look, you could see a tree’s outer bark bored with a labyrinth: the remnants of the destructive mountain pine beetle. The day unearthed a richer layer to the subalpine ecosystem, thanks to Diamond, and an eagerness to recognize the art of nature when I’m outside.

“It’s like someone put glasses on you, and now you can see clearer,” Diamond says, recounting many years ago when he met the person who taught him this way of understanding the environment around him. Her name is Nancy Bockino. 

Neither Diamond nor Bockino quite remember when and where they met, but one thing is certain: they were skiing. Both were — and still are — guides for Exum, a mountain guide service out of Jackson. Bockino has been leading clients on backcountry ski trips and climbing routes up the Grand Teton since 2007, and Diamond since 2015. 

It was early on, Diamond recalls, that he learned what Bockino’s life revolved around beyond guiding: whitebark pine and its conservation.  

“You can’t go walk in the woods with Nancy without hearing about the trees,” he says. “You quickly learn they’re intrinsically part of her personality, she even has names for them. It’s unique. Most of the folks you interact with in a skiing context, they’re there to ski and the trees are just there, but it’s different with Nancy.”

Bockino, a field ecologist, has stewarded whitebark pine in Greater Yellowstone for nearly 30 years. As the child of a science teacher and naturalist, her summers were spent in the mountains of Montana and Idaho where she developed an early devotion to all things ecology, specifically trees. She moved to Jackson in 2000 to work as a botanist in Grand Teton National Park, and volunteered to lead a whitebark pine conservation program on the weekends. Over 18 years, she and others have built the program to where it is today. 

Bockino, 49, leads a team of technicians and volunteers, who she calls Whitebark Warriors, that monitor the pine’s overall health over time as well as the presence of blister rust and mountain pine beetles, two disturbance agents that have decimated whitebark numbers for the last two decades. They also work to preserve the last remaining healthy trees — almost 90 percent of the mature overstory of whitebark in the GYE has already been lost — and gather cones for future seedling replantings. With the support of Grand Teton National Park, the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative, and the Grand Teton National Park Foundation, Bockino hopes to protect the remaining whitebark in the ecosystem and restore what’s been lost by replanting seedlings more resistant to blister rust.

One of her volunteers is Diamond. He remembers Bockino’s request to help her in the field between guiding seasons. By that point, Diamond had been smitten with the trees, too. Bockino says that’s common. “You first meet the whitebark in this new way, and then you just fall in love with them,” she says. 

Diamond grew up on the East Coast, and while he spent a lot of time in those forests, he admitted he didn’t spend much time learning about them. It was his second winter in Greater Yellowstone when he met Bockino, and he had a vague understanding of whitebark pine. 

“I couldn’t have looked at a cluster of trees, though, and told you what they were,” says Diamond, who turns 34 on April 12.

Now that’s all changed. “When you’re out with [Bockino], you just pick it up,” he says. “And for me, it was sort of like anything: the more interesting things I learned about it, the more interested I was. I’d learn a little detail about the tree I didn’t know about before, and that would spark three more questions.”

Diamond has been out with Bockino a dozen or more times, mostly carrying things like the bushels of cones they gather each fall to test for blister rust resistance and hope will produce seedlings to replant in the spring. So far, Bockino estimates they’ve replanted nearly 5,000 trees in the past three years in the GYE, and many more since the early 90s.

Diamond’s impact seems less about his physical strength in the field however, and more tied to his ability to propagate onto others Bockino’s knowledge, insight and way of seeing the natural world in just the same way Bockino mentored him. 

And while recreation cannot easily be equated with conservation — in fact, sometimes and often sits in diametric opposition, especially in Greater Yellowstone — Bockino believes in the power she has as a guide to opening a door of observation and education that can teach recreationists more about the places they recreate within, and also care for their protection. 

That doesn’t mean she is immune to the tension. “It’s hard,” she says. “I feel it guiding sometimes, like, ‘Wow, if I wasn’t doing this, would as many people be coming here?’ Overall, I always feel like I’m a visitor to any space I visit outside. I’m respectful, I’m careful. If a skin track goes over a baby tree, I’m going to take the extra 15 minutes to move the track, and I make my clients help me do this, too.”

Bockino told me stories of her guided winter trips that turn into ecology field days, when she and her clients become distracted by fresh wolf tracks, for example, and decide to follow them rather than ski.

“In the end, I try to teach my clients that we are part of the natural world we’re moving within,” she says,  “and to ask the question of how can we be gentle, healthy, aware and mindful while we’re visiting this place that is home for so many others?” 

Bockino loves watching people’s inquisitive nature flourish, as if from under her wing, like Diamond. He, too, has become aware of the engaging effect he can have on people, especially as a guide. “In the same way I learned about these places through Nancy, I’m just sort of turning that little part on for people. Giving that initial push, like ‘Hey, look at this.’ You never really know what is going to pique someone’s curiosity.”

For both Bockino and Diamond, fostering a deeper understanding for the ecology of a place as a way to advocate for its protection seems inherent to their personal philosophies as guides and recreationists. 

“Any place that you spend a lot of time, the snow or the rocks or the trees, becomes more interesting the more you know,” Diamond says. “It’s easy to take these places for granted, that they exist, until they don’t. And I want to help protect these places — where you can have many different experiences, from athletic pursuits to calm stillness. People go into these places for all different reasons, but if they are gone, you can’t have those experiences anymore.”

Most people spending time in the Teton County backcountry spend most if not all of that time in whitebark habitat, Bockino says. “So their bliss, their work, their adventure, their good times, and their hard times — all are in the alpine and shared with these trees.” 

More than anything, that’s why she believes it’s so important to find people like Diamond and her other volunteers who share in her curiosity and passion — and also her abiding sense of responsibility for the future of the trees and their habitat. 

“It’s a mutualistic relationship,” she says of Diamond and her Whitebark Warrior crew. “They feed my knowledge and passion. It makes you feel hopeful when there is a whole younger generation who is learning to care about the trees they’re skiing within.” 

Bockino sometimes struggles to answer the question of what people can do to help. “That’s always the hardest for me,” she says. “Not everyone can go plant trees or collect cones, but you can learn about the trees. You can have a stack of information that helps you understand climate change and your impact.”

And when you’re out, skiing or running or rafting or walking — as one inevitably is when Greater Yellowstone is your backyard, there’s always a learning opportunity around the corner, Bockino says. “You can teach your friends about the trees.”