02/06/2025
Wilderness orchards as refugia for heirloom apples.
Unkempt groves of fruit trees are the last vestiges of historic homesteads once scattered throughout central Idaho’s Frank Church — River of No Return Wilderness.
Most of those homesteads were acquired by the U.S. Forest Service, which demolished the buildings and infrastructure and allowed nature to reclaim the landscape.
Andrew Armstrong, superintendent of the University of Idaho Taylor Wilderness Research Station, has been on a quest to find those old homesteads and preserve long-lost heritage apple varieties that were planted to sustain early settlers. Partnering with Kyle Nagy, superintendent and orchard operations manager of the University of Idaho, Sandpoint Organic Agriculture Center, Armstrong aims to propagate those abandoned trees and reestablish them in a new orchard at Taylor.
For the past two winters, Armstrong has traveled throughout a 15-mile radius of his remote research facility in search of orchards, accompanied only by his mules. He’s taken tree cuttings from four forgotten homesteads in the Big Creek drainage, which is the largest tributary of the Salmon River’s Middle Fork. His cuttings, known as scions, are the width of a pencil and about a year old, each harboring three to four buds. Nagy has grafted the scions to winter-hardy, Russian rootstock and intends to help Armstrong plant the Taylor orchard this spring.
Read more: https://www.uidaho.edu/news/news-articles/colleges/cals/2025/020525-apple-quest.
University of Idaho College of Natural Resources
