It looks like alien blood!

Map lichen on Wright Peak

Few summers have been as dreary as the one we suffered in 2009, and no summer has made me appreciate sunshine more. The grey finally took a day off, affording me the privilege of embarking upon a warm, clear-sky, cool-breeze hike up Wright Peak in late August. To my delight, I found something more stunning than a superb view patiently awaiting my arrival atop the mountain’s rocky summit.

As the sun made its way closer to the tops of the rugged ranges of the western Adirondacks, I was zipping up my wind breaker and catching one last glimpse of Mt. Colden’s slides before heading off of Wright’s summit. I removed my sunglasses so I could see the features of the steep rock better and there it was—what had once appeared as dark blotches leapt from every slab of anorthosite in a brilliant display of lime green. “My God,” I uttered. “It looks like something with green blood was slaughtered up here!”

From a distance, Rhizocarpon geographicum, or map lichen, looks like green splatter marks with a black spore border. It dots every exposed surface of the rock on Wright Peak in various size splotches; some are over a foot across and others barely an inch. In places where several splotches have converged, the green coloration coupled with a darker border gives it the appearance of continents on a map. Up close, it has a dry, scaly look and it is surprisingly brittle to the touch, especially considering the harsh environment it calls home. No stranger to the elements, map lichen favors cold, open areas of rock, making the exposed alpine zones of the High Peaks prime territory for this species.

Mt. Marcy from the alpine zone on Wright

Research is showing that the environment map lichen lives in might not be quite as harsh as expected. Climatologists consider healthy patches of map lichen to be an indicator of good air quality, and also use them to estimate the age of glacial deposits, a technique called lichenometry. The technique is based on the fact that crustose lichens, of which map lichen is a part, can live for more than 4,000 years.

Map lichen’s ability to grow old gracefully is truly a testament to the resiliency of the species. They are so resilient, in fact, that when the European Space Agency sent map lichen into orbit around Earth in 2005 and exposed it to outer space for 15 days, it returned virtually unaffected.

It is as if this species only criteria are conditions deemed inhospitable by other species. Despite the struggles surviving in such locales must entail, the map lichen just sits there, biding its time and giving an otherworldly brilliance to alpine regions world wide.