Loading ...of spruce made me chuckle because silverngold’s operation near Hazelton was in the “eye of the hurricane” if one looked at a map of active hybridizarion between different species of spruce in British Columbia. The attached image does not reproduce very clearly, but if you drew a triangle enclosing Kitwanga, Hazelton and Moricetown, it would delineate the centre of the “hurricane” of spruce hybridization, involving Sitka spruce towards the coast, white spruce to the east, and Roche spruce to the north of Hazelton.
So the chuckle is because there is virtually no one who can say with much confidence what kind of spruce they are looking at in the area of the black blob in the attached map. Figuring out how to name the hybrid mixes in the spruces of the Nass and Skeena river valleys has had a few people scratching their heads over the years. One fellow I knew, Larry Roche, scratched his head so long and so hard trying to classify these different forms of spruce that someone ended up naming the spruce north of Hazelton after him, Roche spruce. Larry got an extra degree out of the deal.
Macroman, just so you dont feel left out with your Engelmann spruce around where you live, there are reports of Engelmann spruce – Sitka spruce hybrids in the vicinty of the Whistler ski area. Cheers. Equiz