D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
July 2011
The Doctor Is In... the Gila Wilderness
Russ Kleinman's chapter two, documenting the flora
of the Gila online.
Early morning. I am at the Javalina Coffee House, an Internet café in downtown Silver City, in pursuit of Dr. Russell Kleinman. My eyes scan the café regulars and irregulars, the washed and the constantly disheveled, the certifiably mad and the poseurs, the prolific and the nonstarters, shaved heads and balding ones, the lost and found.
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Dr. Russ Kleinman and his hiking dog, Java, a Sheltie. Russ’ wife, Dr. Karen Blisard, also trains dogs in agility and obedience. |
Amid the motley patrons fulfilling both their caffeine and techie cravings sits a guy solo, head bowed toward the computer screen, his narrow, freckled face illumined by digital gleam. For some reason, the Apple logo on his laptop compels my thoughts to Johnny Appleseed, straight out of the Disney film — whoa!
Well, let's see. Johnny Appleseed: itinerant nurseryman fixated on apples who wandered the 1800s frontier wearing old clothes bartered with apple seeds. Johnny may or may not have worn a saucepan on his head. Either way, he would have fit in fine at Javalina.
I sit down with Russ Kleinman: former surgeon who took early retirement three years ago to continue hiking the Gila Wilderness and photographing its flora. With the encouragement of Dr. William Norris, chair of the WNMU botany department, Russ began a website for the native plants of the Gila National Forest, gilaflora.com, providing at least 90% of the visuals himself. Along the way he has also found several plants new to the region.
Dr. Norris believes that "Russ's work in botany is significant, particularly the website — providing a valuable visual tool for botanists around the Southwest and elsewhere to identify our region's plants."
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| Brothera leana, a moss. Kleinman found this moss, not known to grow west of the Mississippi Valley, on a rotting stump on Signal Peak. |
Russ thinks he might have met Bill Norris, his botanical "catalyst," at Arby's.
They quickly recognized that they could assist each other. Russ (who had programmed a map of the Gila with a dot indicating everywhere he has hiked) would show Bill the trails, in exchange for the opportunity to learn plant taxonomy and how to botanize. In this way, Russ Kleinman became a student of plants.
Growing up in Upland, Calif., with a view of Mount Baldy, Russ began hiking as a youngster. He remembers leaving kindergarten to tromp off hiking. The only rule was to return in time for dinner. He describes his entire family as being "very bright." His dad was a physician, his mother a teacher.
A Phi Beta Kappa at Stanford, Russ studied philosophy and German literature and graduated with a second major in biology. He attended medical school at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where he met his wife, Karen Blisard, now a pathologist at Gila Regional Medical Center. Following a residency at UNM Medical School, Russ served as assistant chief of surgery at the VA Hospital in Albuquerque. He and Karen landed in Silver City in 1994.
Russ says he decided to leave medicine while "I was at the top of my game." He knew that he wanted to hike the wilderness while "my legs were still strong and I could still carry 50 pounds on my back."
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Brothera leana shot with a macro lens. |
The long-standing tradition of physician-botanists was a phenomenon that Russ learned about only recently. Quite a few came to New Mexico to botanize, including Dr. George Engelmann, who first described New Mexico's state tree, Pinus edulis, which produces the piñon nut. He also discovered the eponymous Pinus Engelmannii or Apache pine. Among other accomplishments, Engelmann, a St. Louis physician, helped found the Missouri Botanical Garden.
Another physician, Dr. Charles C. Parry, put his name to both the Parry penstemon and agave, to name only two species.
Last fall, Russ found a moss on Signal Peak that was new to the area. This whitish-green bryophyte (mosses don't flower but make spores that resemble strung-together wires) closely resembled a species found in Central America and the eastern US. Russ asked a colleague, Dr. Kelly Allred from NMSU, to meet him at the Peak for a second opinion. After checking the herbarium at NMSU, they discovered that the moss Brothera leana was not known to exist west of the Mississippi Valley.
The discovery was corroborated by the Missouri Botanical Garden;
Russ is publishing his findings about the moss in the journal Evansia. The article raises some basic questions: Was the plant here all along? Is its range shrinking or extending?
To date, with one year into studying mosses, Russ has identified over 80 species in the Gila out of a possible 200-plus.
Because of his photographic skills, Russ has also photographed the plant discoveries of colleagues, including the Mogollon Death Camas and over a dozen species of orchids in the Mogollon Mountains.
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Bigelow’s bristlehead (Carpochaete bigelovii) is a common spring bloomer in the Gila. The surgeon-botanist Dr. John M. Bigelow identified and classified many plants in the Southwest. |
His website offers free visuals to interested persons and receives photographic requests from throughout the world. A recent such request came from a German botanist working in Afghanistan who was unable to photograph a grass, Arundo donax, because it was growing in an unsafe area. It is the same species that grows here and the website was able to provide a photograph.
As a botanist and the current president of the Gila Native Plants Society, Russ is aware of the paucity of funding for his field. "The situation," he says, "has led to hardships for students in the field and herbaria across the country." Botany often loses students to forestry as well.
This fall, Russ will co-lead a Gila Native Plant Society seminar on grasses and teach a class on plant taxonomy at WNMU. Dr. Norris stresses, "Russ's enthusiasm for botany is contagious and has inspired many others to be interested in plants."
Dr. Kleinman gulps down a last sip of coffee and dashes off to Harlan Hall for an algae and fungi class. I am left to ponder what future discoveries may await him once the monsoons hit the Gila and a flowering fantasia occurs.
All plant photos seen here were taken by Dr. Russell Kleinman and may be viewed at gilaflora.com, a website hosted by WNMU.
Additional photographs appear in
Desert Exposure's Extras,