Piñon Nuts un-edited

All pine trees bear edible nuts, but only four varieties of the piñon produce nuts large enough to be "worth the harvesting". These piñon trees thrive in mountain deserts and on mesas at elevations of 3,500 to 9,000 feet as far north as Idaho and south Nevada foothills on the west and ranging as far east as the eastern slopes of the rocky Mountains. Florence Blanchard, who wrote this article, recommends that you read Donald Culross Peatie's A Natural History of Western Trees if you want further information about piñon nuts.

Take a lazy fall afternoon in the great U.S. Southwest, add the delightful aroma of a thick pine mountain forest, top with a generous helping of the stickiest sap imaginable . . . and what have you got? Piñon nutting, that's what!

I doubt if anyone really knows just when the earliest human inhabitants settled in the U.S. Southwest. But it's a cinch that those Native Americans would have found it a great deal more difficult to live in this region if the piñon pines hadn't gotten here first.

Piñon nuts burn hotter than any of its numerous evergreen relatives and, as a fireplace fuel, it has no comparison. (Just catch one whiff of the incense-like aroma emanating from a smoldering log and you'll be a piñon convert forever!) The famous hogans (pit houses) of the Southwest were constructed with timbers from this high-desert tree and the Native Americans caulked their baskets and water bottles with its gummy pitch. At least one Indian tribe still dyes wool black with a coloring made from the same resin.

And then there's the delicious piñon nut, which actually was the major source of winter protein for generations of the Utes and Paiutes of the Great Basin region of the Southwest. The nut was such an important staple in the diet of these peoples, in fact, that a bad piñon year could mean near-starvation for them.

Some tribes of western Indians still depend heavily on the piñon for their livelihood — the nuts sell for anywhere from $3.50 (unshelled) to $6.50 (shelled) a pound in California health food stores and gourmet shops — and maintain control of their traditional harvest grounds.

In other areas, however, the U.S. Forest Service will issue a commercial nutting license to almost any individual who wants to try his or her hand at gathering the piñon's bounty from national forests for sale to the specialty commercial market. The USFS is also generally happy to issue permits and directions to a likely nutting area to individuals and families who merely want to harvest piñons for their own use. (The service widely endorses pine nutting, since only a very small number of the unharvested seeds ever germinate. Gathering and eating as many piñon nuts as possible each year, in short, in no way damages the pine forests that produce them.)

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