Trail of Time Self-Guided Audio Tour

About this tour

Less than ninety years ago, the ground beneath your feet was buried under hundreds of feet of glacial ice. Your great-grandparents were probably alive. Today, it's forest. Welcome to the Trail of Time — a one-mile loop where the timeline isn't a metaphor. It's chiseled into the rocks under your boots. Along the way, you'll meet the unlikely characters who built this forest out of nothing — pioneers so unglamorous nobody talks about them at parties, but everything taller than your ankle owes them a debt. You'll find out which tree is quietly cheating biology in the most useful way possible, why the species that made the whole valley possible eventually gets brutally betrayed by the species it helped, and what's going on with those ancient spruces that appear to be standing on tiptoes — basically a hundred-year-old crime scene, still in progress. You'll read dates carved into boulders by some unsung Forest Service worker who decided, decades ago, that geology was too important to let blow away. You'll learn why the parking lot is part of the timeline too. And you'll walk away with one slightly unsettling idea about how forests work that you won't shake for a while. By the end, you'll never look at a moss-covered rock the same way again — which, honestly, is more of a personality shift than most one-mile walks tend to deliver.

Stops on this tour

1. 1The 1937 Ice Limit
2. 2The Pioneers (Lichen & Moss)
3. 3The Nitrogen Fixers
4. 4Reading the Dates
5. 5The Shaded Canopy
6. 6The Nurse Logs
7. 7The Return of the Fauna
8. 8The Climax Forest
9. 9The Invisible Ice