Fishlake National Forest

The place

The Fishlake National Forest sits in the high plateau country of south-central Utah, scattered across roughly 1.8 million acres and nine counties from a headquarters in Richfield. It is not one solid block of woods but a set of forested highlands -- the Tushar Mountains, Monroe Mountain, the Sevier Plateau, the Pahvant Range and the Fish Lake Plateau -- rising in green, aspen-covered islands above the dry valleys and red rock of the surrounding Great Basin and Colorado Plateau country.

Its heart is Fish Lake, which the Forest Service calls the largest natural mountain lake in Utah, a cold, deep sheet of water ringed by aspen and famous for its trophy fishing. Around it stand the two features the forest is best known for: mile after mile of quaking aspen -- including the celebrated Pando clone -- and, to the west, the tall volcanic crest of the Tushars, the third-highest mountain range in the state.

History

The Fishlake National Forest was established on July 1, 1908, formed by combining the earlier Fish Lake and Glenwood National Forests into a single unit. Its high, well-watered plateaus have drawn people far longer than that: the land holds sites such as the Chalk Creek rock art, and Fish Lake itself was long a gathering place. In one documented transaction from March 10, 1889, Native water rights to the lake were sold for nine horses, 500 pounds of flour, a steer and a suit of clothes -- a small window onto how the region changed hands in the settlement era.

Wildlife & plants

The forest's aspen groves, conifer stands and mountain meadows support a full range of Rocky Mountain wildlife. Elk, mule deer, black bear and cougar all range here, along with moose, bighorn sheep and mountain goats in the higher country and wild turkey in the woods below. Beaver work the streams, and the skies hold eagles, owls, woodpeckers and hummingbirds. Fish Lake and the forest's other waters are the draw for anglers, and the same big herds of deer and elk that make this prime hunting country are also, in one famous spot, a management headache: heavy browsing by deer and elk is one of the pressures on the young shoots of the Pando aspen clone.

Notable features

The forest's signature wonder is Pando -- Latin for 'I spread' -- a single male quaking aspen whose root system sends up tens of thousands of trunks that only look like a separate forest. Every one of its roughly 47,000 stems is genetically identical, sharing one enormous root system that covers about 106 acres and weighs on the order of 13 million pounds, which makes Pando one of the largest and heaviest known living organisms on Earth. Its exact age is uncertain -- current research puts the root system in the range of thousands of years, well short of older headline estimates -- but it is unquestionably ancient, and it is slowly struggling, thinned by drought, browsing animals and decades of fire suppression. Nearby, Fish Lake spreads out as the largest natural mountain lake in Utah, while to the west the Tushar Mountains climb past 12,000 feet to Delano Peak at 12,174 feet, the high point of a volcanic range that ranks third-tallest in the state.