After climbing over the Sierra Nevada mountains from the west to the east, the landscape drops into the Great Basin. Here it is the country of sagebrush steppe, desert grasslands, cottonwood and aspen canyons, river willows, and piñon-juniper forests. This year, on the border of Nevada and California I gathered pinenuts from the single-needle piñon trees (Pinus monophylla). It wasn’t my first time gathering pinenuts — I gathered from the two-needle pinyon Pinus edulis in Taos, New Mexico in 2015 — but this was a really enjoyable trip and I got to dig deeper into the ecology of these trees as well as the ins and outs of the pinenutting process.

Continue reading The Piñon Pines — Pinus monophylla, Pinus edulis, and more… →