Just a couple quick responses to some recent comments:

(And yes, I know I've got dozens of unanswered comments stretching back months...)

Bonnie asked if elk are "decimating" aspens in our part of the planet.

No, but maybe sorta. Depends on what you mean by "decimating" and how big an area you look at. Our elk herds are no where near as out of control as those of our neighboring state to the south. The benefit of having the ability to set hunting seasons and harvest quotas herd by herd, rather than for the entire state at one time as they do. And of having elk that can still move down onto flat prairie or sagebrush lands to winter, rather than being snowbound into narrow mountain valleys.

We are losing our aspens in many places. But more often due to browsing by cattle, rather than elk. But elk do their share of damage. In our higher mountains in the Yellowstone country, I suspect elk are the greater culprits.

Problem is, aspen is a soft wood tree, and they simply cannot live that long. So each stand, which is usually a single clone with lots of tree "stems", survives by sending out lots of suckers. Unfortunately, these young suckers are tender and high in protein, so they get browsed. Heavily by cattle if they're there in the late summer when everything else is dry and brown. And just as heavily by elk if the young aspen are all that is available in late fall or early winter. So the suckers never grow, the old trees die and are not replaced, and the aspen stand is gone.

Got quite a few sagebrush-covered north hillsides in the desert where you can find old aspen logs. Maybe even a sucker or two that still survives, despite heavy browsing every year.

Have a great pair of shots taken in Rocky Mountain National Park of C standing next to an exclosure (Yes, Melissa and Doug, an "exclosure" is an area fenced to keep critters out. Need another whole entry here to describe some of their uses, and a few stories.) which has 15-foot tall 12-year old aspen trees inside it, with old dying trees outside. With a 12-year old sucker that is still only a foot tall on the outside. Browsed back to a stump every year. A result of too many elk.

Was going to try to make a whole entry about it, but here's some aspen regen in the exclosure I checked on Saturday:

Elk can and do get into that exclosure, but cattle can't.

One of the goals of the wolf reintroduction into the Yellowstone country was to regenerate aspen. By controlling elk herds. Turns out they have been successful, more so because fear of the large canids tends to keep elk out of aspen stands, rather than from any noticeable reduction in elk numbers.

Problem is, even if you fix the cattle and elk problems, the aspen often still don't come back if they're already gone. The seeds need just the right seedbed to germinate.

The kind of soil you get after a fire. Fires favor aspen, by killing off competitive conifers and sagebrush, and germinating aspen seeds that have been dormant for years or decades.

And, also for Melissa:

Yes, 62-across is probably ALAI, if there is an actress named "Mala" Powers out there (58-down).

And I figured out 36-down ("Lemon ____") is "LAW", making 39-across, "Full-page illustration" a "PLATE". And making 45-across, "Happy shout" to be "WOW".

You know, Andrew has recently provided for public diaries on Dland, and for guest entries. Maybe we should create one for the sole purpose of doing crossword puzzles together. (Although, I'd want them to be done by my rules... you gotta start with 1-across or 1-down, and every new word has to connect to an existing word. And no reference books.)