172. Mountain Mahogony

 

There is an amazing tree that grows on the cliffs and hillsides of the Salmon River and lower Snake River in Hell’s Canyon. It’s the mountain mahogany and you can find it in other drier places in the west besides Hell’s Canyon and the Salmon River canyon, but those Idaho rivers are my home and where I’m most familiar with that tree. It isn’t really a mahogany at all and it’s more a shrub than an actual tree, though it does typically only have one trunk like the other trees.

The leaves of the evergreen mountain mahogany are tiny, curly little dark green elongated leaves that are so dark they make the tree look like a dark, overly tall sage brush. They have little yellow flowers that bloom in the spring. Because it was one of those trees that didn’t usually grow in forests and was only to be found in sparse outcroppings on the cliffs over the river, it wasn’t a tree I really knew much about because no one seemed to use it for much. I didn’t even learn its name until my later teens unlike all the conifers I knew so well from childhood.

During my college years when I was thinning timber in Harney County, Oregon for the forest service is when I figured out why the mountain mahogany took on the mahogany name. Whenever I had to cut one of those down I had to sharpen the chain on my saw because the wood was so hard. The wood is also a rich dark brown like mahogany and can be used to make some beautiful items, though typically those items need to be smaller.

I will say this about my appreciation for the mountain mahogany: it was always there lending a beauty to the cliffs of home every bit as valid as moss on those same rocks. And I always took it for granted just like grass on the hills. It is beautiful and wild in a way that we canyon dwellers probably overlook more often than not, but now that I’m away from those canyons on the Palouse (not so far away) I look at those canyon walls with more appreciation. The mountain mahogany has a part of my appreciation for home.