The Cathedral Spires in the Black Hills are unique for more than one reason. Among the gothic granite spires, there's a small, relict community of limber pine, a species more common in higher mountain ranges further West.
Limber pines tend to thrive in harsh, dry and windy conditions, and in high elevations, and consequently can be bent and gnarled in appearance. They are often photographed and poetically described.
Writing about the limber pine, Nebraska botanist Raymond Pool was impressed that: "This tree is able to maintain a foothold upon dry open tracts in the very teeth of the furious gales that often swoop down upon them from the heights."
"The individuality of the limber pines," wrote Pool, "and the range in morphological reactions to the rigorous factors of their most extreme habitats are exceedingly varied and bizarre... There are, in fact, scarcely two trees of this species to be found among the pioneers at timber-line that closely resemble each other in their bodily forms. Each tree appears to have worked out the solution of its own individual salvation under great stressed in its own individual manner."
The easiest way to tell limber pine apart from ponderosa pine is their much shorter needles, which are bunched in fascicles of five. They also have a lighter colored bark, and more flexible branches.
The small stand of limber pine near the Cathedral Spires is made up of less than one hundred trees. Some have been labeled with a number, engraved on an aluminum tag, during previous counts.
There are a couple theories as to the provenance of the relict stand. People could have planted them there, or glaciation could have separated them from their cousins to the West.