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The Twilight Forest: An Elegy for Ponderosa in a Changing West
With their towering, cinnamon-colored trunks and dusky green canopies, ponderosa pine has long been a charismatic icon of the American West. Yet a quiet unraveling has in the past decade, in a vast area from Santa Fe to the Sierras, more than two hundred million ponderosa have died. While some trees will survive in cooler places, scientists estimate that by mid-century less than five percent of the ponderosa in the American Southwest may remain. As the very character of this vast region shifts, what will be left behind? And how can we come to terms with such profound loss?
In The Twilight Forest, Gary Ferguson brings readers on an expansive journey through the ponderosa forests of the Southwest both to mourn—and to celebrate—the forests that nurtured him. In warm and luminous storytelling, Ferguson weaves together the human and natural history of ponderosa, from its march across the West more than 10,000 years ago, to centuries of artists inspired by its dazzling stature and shady passageways. Both wildfire and climate change are constant presences on this journey. Fire is necessary for healthy forests but has turned deadly, while climate change stresses even the hardiest beings of the natural world. Yet the story of ponderosa reminds us that loss can be a gateway to connection—to nature and each other.
While it is tempting to hide from the changes around us, Ferguson offers a healing “to pick even one of these thousand doors of loss, pull it open and walk through.” The resulting journey is a life-affirming tribute to one of America’s most cherished wild landscapes.
In The Twilight Forest, Gary Ferguson brings readers on an expansive journey through the ponderosa forests of the Southwest both to mourn—and to celebrate—the forests that nurtured him. In warm and luminous storytelling, Ferguson weaves together the human and natural history of ponderosa, from its march across the West more than 10,000 years ago, to centuries of artists inspired by its dazzling stature and shady passageways. Both wildfire and climate change are constant presences on this journey. Fire is necessary for healthy forests but has turned deadly, while climate change stresses even the hardiest beings of the natural world. Yet the story of ponderosa reminds us that loss can be a gateway to connection—to nature and each other.
While it is tempting to hide from the changes around us, Ferguson offers a healing “to pick even one of these thousand doors of loss, pull it open and walk through.” The resulting journey is a life-affirming tribute to one of America’s most cherished wild landscapes.
176 pages, Hardcover
Published October 16, 2025
About the author
Gary Ferguson
97 books85 followersNature writer, 1956-
Award-winning author Gary Ferguson has written for a variety of national publications, including Vanity Fair and the Chicago Tribune, and is the author of twenty-six books on nature and science. His memoir, The Carry Home, which the Los Angeles Times called “gorgeous, with beauty on every page,” was awarded “Best Nature book of the Year” by the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute. Gary is the co-founder of Full Ecology, with his wife, social scientists Mary M. Clare.
Award-winning author Gary Ferguson has written for a variety of national publications, including Vanity Fair and the Chicago Tribune, and is the author of twenty-six books on nature and science. His memoir, The Carry Home, which the Los Angeles Times called “gorgeous, with beauty on every page,” was awarded “Best Nature book of the Year” by the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute. Gary is the co-founder of Full Ecology, with his wife, social scientists Mary M. Clare.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 7, 2026
As a person who loves the desert Southwest, it was a treat to read this book by someone who cares so much for this special place on the planet. While this book mainly focuses on the ponderosa and how it is being affected by climate change and wildfires, the book is really about the West and the impact of these factors on the environment as a whole. Written with great tenderness and affection.
May 21, 2026
On December 15, 2025, Colorado governor Jared Polis issued an executive order to create a Mountain Pine Beetle Ponderosa Outbreak Task Force to address a growing wildfire crisis and the beetle’s impact on watersheds, recreation and infrastructure. Mountain pine beetles (Dendroctonus ponderosae) are native to western conifer forests, where they typically attack and kill weakened and diseased trees. But, when forests are dense or stressed by drought and warm temperatures, beetle populations can explode to epidemic levels.
From the late 1990s through 2013, the beetles affected 3.4 million acres in Colorado, attacking predominately lodgepole pines (Pinus contorta) at higher elevations, where they killed 80–90% of trees in some stands. In the early 2010s, the beetles began to transition to ponderosa pines (Pinus ponderosa) at lower elevations along Colorado’s Front Range. Heavy rains and cold winters ended the Front Range epidemic. In recent years, though, oscillating precipitation and temperatures have plagued pine forests that largely escaped the prior epidemic, leaving them susceptible to new outbreaks.
Colorado’s Front Range stretches from the Wyoming border 150 miles southward to Colorado Springs. The region is home to 80% of the state’s six million residents, and its forests provide those residents with water and recreational resources, both of which are threatened by the trees’ demise, especially if the dead forests are subsequently consumed by wildfires. Experts expect nearly complete mortality for ponderosas over the next five years.
While the forecast for the Front Range is especially dire, the ponderosa’s plight is hardly restricted to Colorado. Author Gary Ferguson’s book is an account of a road trip through the American Southwest to witness a “vanishing”—a human-caused disappearance of hundreds of millions of ponderosa pines from New Mexico to California. Weakened by a lack of precipitation and high temperatures and then succumbing to insects and disease, or burned into oblivion by repeated, abnormally intense wildfires, much of what is now ponderosa forest is transmogrifying into permanent grasslands and shrublands.
Research published by Nathan McDonald and colleagues in 2016 (Nature Climate Change 6[3]: 295–300) predicted that 72% of all coniferous forests in the Southwest could die by 2050, with more to follow by the end of the century. Ferguson’s 1,500-mile journey was an attempt to understand how such an unraveling came to happen. He also explores how the loss of the forests affects the human psyche. Furgeson quotes poet Jane Hirshfield, who marked the death of a favorite tree by writing, “Today, for some, a universe has vanished.”
This is an intensely personal book. Throughout his life, Feguson has found solace in western coniferous forests, often ponderosa forests, following loss and tragedy. Taking this approach allows him to reflect on the effect ponderosas have had on other people as well.
Ferguson broadly introduces the species in the first few chapters. He traces the species’ origin and distribution, its adaptations for living in dry conditions, and the value it holds for Indigenous people and contemporary Americans. He then sets off on his idyll, beginning at the Kiowa Ranch in northern New Mexico. The ranch came into the hands of wealthy banking heiress Mable Dodge Luhan. There, self-exiled from East Coast society, she established a salon for progressive thinkers and artists from around the world. Acclaimed and controversial author D.H. Lawrence and his wife intermittently spent months in a writer’s cottage (a rustic cabin) on the ranch from 1921 to 1925, enthralled by the landscape and by a marvelous lone ponderosa outside the cabin door. Painter Georgia O’Keefe subsequently came under the spell of the landscape as well and used the cabin, where she produced a painting variously titled but known today as “The Lawrence Tree.” For me, this chapter, early in the book, is the most poignant narrative that Ferguson recounts.
From the Kiowa Ranch, Ferguson drives southwest to explore the 125-acre, 400-year-old ponderosa stand known as the History Grove in the spectacular Valles Caldera National Preserve. He saunters through the magnificent, miraculously preserved stand, a walk facilitated by the fact that ponderosa pine forests that experience occasional low-intensity fires have open, grassy ground layers with little woody vegetation to impede walking. As he leaves the History Grove, Ferguson crosses over the edge of 2013’s 24,000-acre Thompson Ridge Fire, which allows him to consider the importance of fire in maintaining the forests and to introduce the dangerous and destructive folly of routinely excluding low-intensity fire from dry Southwestern woodlands.
His next stop is Bandelier National Monument, 75% of which burned in 2011. Here he considers the value that ponderosa pine held for Puebloan people, especially for architectural use. He also presents the origins of Smokey the Bear and the meme’s role in furthering misguided fire suppression. After a tangent to trace the history of dendrochronology, Feguson relates Aldo Leopold’s successful efforts to establish the world’s first designated wilderness in the Gila National Forest. Pushing on, he travels to Arizona’s Mogollon Rim where he profiles the role of fire in ecosystem change and reminisces about his personal experience caretaking a ranch in the winter.
The book takes a new tack beginning in Chapter 10 and continuing through the final four chapters. Ferguson explores the profoundly revolutionary world view espoused by philosophers 400 years ago beginning in the Enlightenment. The era gave birth to modern science and, in the process, fueled a fiercely rational, mechanistic style of inquiry into the workings of the physical universe. This approach was so successful it burst out of the confines of physics and chemistry, where it proved incredibly useful, to encompass every aspect of our lives. According to Ferguson, applying the tools of early science to life wholesale would be humanity’s undoing, channeling the way we think and limiting the breadth of how we see ourselves and the world. Forestry was caught up early in this revolution—in fact, it may have been the first nature-focused discipline to arise during the Enlightenment. Forest management became rationalized and perceptions of wildness and waste were banished. Wildfire threatened forestry and had to be suppressed. As a result, contemporary forests have become overstocked tinderboxes as the climate has warmed.
Ferguson interrupts his exposition about rationality during a stop in southern Utah’s chaotic canyon country—the very antithesis to rationality. There, he profiles Everett Ruess, an adolescent who wandered the wrinkled wilderness for four years in the early 1930s until he ultimately disappeared in 1934.
Continuing westward, Feguson quickly crosses the Great Basin in southwestern Utah and southern Nevada, a landscape largely bereft of ponderosas. However, he does note that a ponderosa growing in Utah’s Wah Wah Mountains was believed to be the world’s oldest at 940 years until it died in 2016 from a mountain pine beetle infestation stemming from drought stress.
Feguson continues into California, focusing his wanderings on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He notes that California, perhaps more than anywhere else in the country, is a place where our giant blunder of overeager fire suppression has collided head-on with the realities of climate change. The consequences have been unmistakable, remaking thousands of square miles of forest, grasslands, shrublands and human communities. He explores the foothills in a meandering drive northward, stopping to recount the destruction caused by two fires in 2021, then continuing through an astonishing series of massive fire scars that collectively encompass 2.5 million acres.
As befits an elegy, much of Ferguson’s writing is lyrical, heartfelt and sincere. He occasionally uses sentence fragments to create particular emphasis. He also uses the word “tosses” as a noun too liberally; it catches-up the reader because of its unusual construction. The end matter includes a list of selected books and articles that serve as source materials. There is no index.
The first nine chapters of The Twilight Forest are engaging. However, once Ferguson shifts to focus on the Enlightenment, the effects of highly rational forest management, and wildfires, the narrative becomes somewhat repetitive and less compelling.
From the late 1990s through 2013, the beetles affected 3.4 million acres in Colorado, attacking predominately lodgepole pines (Pinus contorta) at higher elevations, where they killed 80–90% of trees in some stands. In the early 2010s, the beetles began to transition to ponderosa pines (Pinus ponderosa) at lower elevations along Colorado’s Front Range. Heavy rains and cold winters ended the Front Range epidemic. In recent years, though, oscillating precipitation and temperatures have plagued pine forests that largely escaped the prior epidemic, leaving them susceptible to new outbreaks.
Colorado’s Front Range stretches from the Wyoming border 150 miles southward to Colorado Springs. The region is home to 80% of the state’s six million residents, and its forests provide those residents with water and recreational resources, both of which are threatened by the trees’ demise, especially if the dead forests are subsequently consumed by wildfires. Experts expect nearly complete mortality for ponderosas over the next five years.
While the forecast for the Front Range is especially dire, the ponderosa’s plight is hardly restricted to Colorado. Author Gary Ferguson’s book is an account of a road trip through the American Southwest to witness a “vanishing”—a human-caused disappearance of hundreds of millions of ponderosa pines from New Mexico to California. Weakened by a lack of precipitation and high temperatures and then succumbing to insects and disease, or burned into oblivion by repeated, abnormally intense wildfires, much of what is now ponderosa forest is transmogrifying into permanent grasslands and shrublands.
Research published by Nathan McDonald and colleagues in 2016 (Nature Climate Change 6[3]: 295–300) predicted that 72% of all coniferous forests in the Southwest could die by 2050, with more to follow by the end of the century. Ferguson’s 1,500-mile journey was an attempt to understand how such an unraveling came to happen. He also explores how the loss of the forests affects the human psyche. Furgeson quotes poet Jane Hirshfield, who marked the death of a favorite tree by writing, “Today, for some, a universe has vanished.”
This is an intensely personal book. Throughout his life, Feguson has found solace in western coniferous forests, often ponderosa forests, following loss and tragedy. Taking this approach allows him to reflect on the effect ponderosas have had on other people as well.
Ferguson broadly introduces the species in the first few chapters. He traces the species’ origin and distribution, its adaptations for living in dry conditions, and the value it holds for Indigenous people and contemporary Americans. He then sets off on his idyll, beginning at the Kiowa Ranch in northern New Mexico. The ranch came into the hands of wealthy banking heiress Mable Dodge Luhan. There, self-exiled from East Coast society, she established a salon for progressive thinkers and artists from around the world. Acclaimed and controversial author D.H. Lawrence and his wife intermittently spent months in a writer’s cottage (a rustic cabin) on the ranch from 1921 to 1925, enthralled by the landscape and by a marvelous lone ponderosa outside the cabin door. Painter Georgia O’Keefe subsequently came under the spell of the landscape as well and used the cabin, where she produced a painting variously titled but known today as “The Lawrence Tree.” For me, this chapter, early in the book, is the most poignant narrative that Ferguson recounts.
From the Kiowa Ranch, Ferguson drives southwest to explore the 125-acre, 400-year-old ponderosa stand known as the History Grove in the spectacular Valles Caldera National Preserve. He saunters through the magnificent, miraculously preserved stand, a walk facilitated by the fact that ponderosa pine forests that experience occasional low-intensity fires have open, grassy ground layers with little woody vegetation to impede walking. As he leaves the History Grove, Ferguson crosses over the edge of 2013’s 24,000-acre Thompson Ridge Fire, which allows him to consider the importance of fire in maintaining the forests and to introduce the dangerous and destructive folly of routinely excluding low-intensity fire from dry Southwestern woodlands.
His next stop is Bandelier National Monument, 75% of which burned in 2011. Here he considers the value that ponderosa pine held for Puebloan people, especially for architectural use. He also presents the origins of Smokey the Bear and the meme’s role in furthering misguided fire suppression. After a tangent to trace the history of dendrochronology, Feguson relates Aldo Leopold’s successful efforts to establish the world’s first designated wilderness in the Gila National Forest. Pushing on, he travels to Arizona’s Mogollon Rim where he profiles the role of fire in ecosystem change and reminisces about his personal experience caretaking a ranch in the winter.
The book takes a new tack beginning in Chapter 10 and continuing through the final four chapters. Ferguson explores the profoundly revolutionary world view espoused by philosophers 400 years ago beginning in the Enlightenment. The era gave birth to modern science and, in the process, fueled a fiercely rational, mechanistic style of inquiry into the workings of the physical universe. This approach was so successful it burst out of the confines of physics and chemistry, where it proved incredibly useful, to encompass every aspect of our lives. According to Ferguson, applying the tools of early science to life wholesale would be humanity’s undoing, channeling the way we think and limiting the breadth of how we see ourselves and the world. Forestry was caught up early in this revolution—in fact, it may have been the first nature-focused discipline to arise during the Enlightenment. Forest management became rationalized and perceptions of wildness and waste were banished. Wildfire threatened forestry and had to be suppressed. As a result, contemporary forests have become overstocked tinderboxes as the climate has warmed.
Ferguson interrupts his exposition about rationality during a stop in southern Utah’s chaotic canyon country—the very antithesis to rationality. There, he profiles Everett Ruess, an adolescent who wandered the wrinkled wilderness for four years in the early 1930s until he ultimately disappeared in 1934.
Continuing westward, Feguson quickly crosses the Great Basin in southwestern Utah and southern Nevada, a landscape largely bereft of ponderosas. However, he does note that a ponderosa growing in Utah’s Wah Wah Mountains was believed to be the world’s oldest at 940 years until it died in 2016 from a mountain pine beetle infestation stemming from drought stress.
Feguson continues into California, focusing his wanderings on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He notes that California, perhaps more than anywhere else in the country, is a place where our giant blunder of overeager fire suppression has collided head-on with the realities of climate change. The consequences have been unmistakable, remaking thousands of square miles of forest, grasslands, shrublands and human communities. He explores the foothills in a meandering drive northward, stopping to recount the destruction caused by two fires in 2021, then continuing through an astonishing series of massive fire scars that collectively encompass 2.5 million acres.
As befits an elegy, much of Ferguson’s writing is lyrical, heartfelt and sincere. He occasionally uses sentence fragments to create particular emphasis. He also uses the word “tosses” as a noun too liberally; it catches-up the reader because of its unusual construction. The end matter includes a list of selected books and articles that serve as source materials. There is no index.
The first nine chapters of The Twilight Forest are engaging. However, once Ferguson shifts to focus on the Enlightenment, the effects of highly rational forest management, and wildfires, the narrative becomes somewhat repetitive and less compelling.
January 14, 2026
5 stars for nature/tree/animal stories and educational stuff.
1 star when being preached to (climate change…) and personal sad stories. If I only had a buck for each time “climate change” and/or “my first dead wife” was mentioned.
One nit. Early on, the author mentions that centuries ago (don’t remember the time frame) there were hardly any of the trees in the US, then jumps ahead when there are huge forests of them. What happened?
Disclosure: I live in a ponderosa area and continue to (also) be in awe of these trees.
1 star when being preached to (climate change…) and personal sad stories. If I only had a buck for each time “climate change” and/or “my first dead wife” was mentioned.
One nit. Early on, the author mentions that centuries ago (don’t remember the time frame) there were hardly any of the trees in the US, then jumps ahead when there are huge forests of them. What happened?
Disclosure: I live in a ponderosa area and continue to (also) be in awe of these trees.
March 29, 2026
“It’s dry and spacious groves invite you to camp among them”, writes the Naturalist Donald Peattie about the ponderosa, “Its shade is never too thin and never too dense. Its great boles and boughs frame many of the grandest views of snow-capped cones, nostalgic mesas, and all that bring the world to the West’s wide door.”
December 19, 2025
4.5 stars
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews