This is the tall, narrow variety of the species called the Lodgepole Pine that grows in the western mountains of the Rocky Mountains of Colorado through Idaho-Montana up Alberta & British Columbia up to the southern Yukon and in the Sierra Nevada & Cascade mountains of California through Washington. Its dark green, stiff, needles are about 1 to 3 inches long in bundles of two, (thus a hard pine). Its small 1 to 2 inch long cones are conical with a stiff prickle on each cone scale. Its cones stay closed for years, but do open with ground fire heat and reseed burnt ground. It is fast growing and lives over 250 years. One of my cousins and his wife had a second home high in the Colorado Rockies near Breckenridge where this species was so abundant and the main tree species. Outbreaks of the western pine bark beetle have killed off a number of this conifer in Colorado, but still abundant. (The short, wide variety of this species is usually called the Shore Pine that grows along the Pacific shore from northern California up to southeast Alaska, and only gets about 20 to 30 feet high and more irregular in form.)

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