FAIRBANKS (AP) -- Firefighters have a name for the black spruce tree, the scourge of Interior Alaska this summer.
``We call it gasoline on a stick,'' said Marc Lee, Fairbanks area forester for the Alaska Department of Natural Resources.
With nearly 4.1 million acres burned in wildfires this summer, the 2004 season is approaching second-worst status since record-keeping began in the 1950s.
Thank the little black spruce tree. Sure, the weather's been dry and there have been a lot of lightning strikes, but the spruce is ready to burn.
``It's an inevitability,'' Lee said.
Plentiful though it is, black spruce is the outcast of Alaska's plant world. Only the most ardent plant lovers see beauty in its gnarled, stunted form.
The species has no commercial value in Alaska and has been studied very little over the years, belittled for its ignoble qualities and economic insignificance.
Almost as if shunned by its peers, it seeks out the dark corners and low spots of the country. But like the protagonist in a Stephen King novel, the wallflower will eventually have revenge.
So it has been this summer, the lowly picea mariana stepping into the spotlight.
``It's a huge component of the landscape,'' said Scott Rupp, a University of Alaska professor. ``And, as you can see, if you get the right conditions it can become the top tree in Alaska.''
Glenn Juday knows as much about the black spruce as anybody. And the UAF professor sees a dark design in the evolutionary history of the black spruce.
The species seeks survival and success through the most dire of means, a scorched-earth policy meant to expand its borders.
The black spruce gets muscled out of nicer climes and festers in bogs and cold spots, gathering its strength. Two black spruce become four, four become eight and slowly the trees begin to take up larger sections of the countryside.
Usually, a stand sits on top of permafrost or very cold ground. This lowers the rate of decomposition in the soil, making nutrients scarce, and shortens the summer growing season. Often a black spruce that's decades old might look like Salvador Dali's version of a broomstick.
At the same time, the spruce drop needles and cones that clog the forest floor and are part of a layering process that helps the spruce put a tight squeeze on its patch of land.
By age 50 or so, a black spruce stand is becoming ripe for a burn and age increases the odds of fire. Branches cover the trunk of the tree from top to bottom and twigs and limbs angle down, giving fire an easy step ladder from the forest floor into the canopy.
Its needles are covered with a waxy substance that burns well and its cones, which sit at the top of the tree, are partially sealed shut, requiring heat to fully open them.
And those seeds are tough, designed to withstand extremely high temperatures. Slowly, the black spruce becomes a torch, with its toes curled in the volatile duff of the forest floor and its crown of cones tipped to the sky to offer fire to the wind.
On a hot, sunny day, trees and plants open a system of pores to take in carbon dioxide and other beneficial gases - losing moisture in the process. But unlike other plants, the black spruce doesn't take measures to replace lost water by absorbing through its roots always-plentiful water from the boggy soils.
``It just closes up shop and stops,'' Juday said. Within hours on a hot day, he said, the canopy of a black spruce tree stand is creating its own arid, fire-friendly atmosphere.
At its most perfect, a black spruce-fueled fire will dash across the tops of trees, spreading fast and gobbling up acreage.
It's not all bad, however.
A burned black spruce won't burn again, meaning a community threatened this year might wait years to see a fire again.
