Jutting above us, mountains contain cone-bearing trees, foxes, bears, eagles

Pale Townsend's big-eared bat Ridge-nosed rattlesnake Black bear White-tailed deer

Keep climbing past the woodland biome, and between 6,000 and 7,000 feet in elevation you'll enter coniferous forest. Coniferous means cone-bearing, and trees that bear cones are normally found in places like Canada. But in the Sonoran Desert, every 1,000 feet you climb in elevation is equal to moving about 300 miles toward the North Pole.

By the time you're in coniferous forest, you're in one of the very special parts of the Sonoran Desert known as Sky Islands. They're called this because these forested mountains jut into the sky like islands surrounded by a sea of desert.

From the desert floor, the mountains rise through biomes such as grassland, chaparral and woodland into three kinds of coniferous forest. All those habitats have different plants and animals, so sky islands have a rich variety of plants and wildlife.

When you first enter coniferous forest, trees called ponderosa pines cover the landscape. Drive up the Catalina Highway about 17 miles to Rose Canyon Lake and you'll be smack-dab in ponderosa pine forest, for example. Keep heading up toward Mount Lemmon, and the ponderosa pines will gradually be replaced by fir trees. The fir forest appears at about 7,500 feet elevation, where the dominant trees are Douglas and white firs. A good example of fir forest is the area around the village of Summerhaven, which is 7,670 feet above sea level.

Above 9,000 feet begins the last level of coniferous forest, the spruce-fir forest where Englemann spruce and alpine fir trees begin to dominate. The top of Mount Lemmon sits at 9,157 feet in elevation, but if you want to see spruce-fir forest, you'll have to get out of the car and hike the Mount Lemmon trail.

Forests are home to some of the biggest animals in the Sonoran Desert - black bears. Black bears of the Sonoran Desert are actually brown in color. They can be found all the way down to desert scrub habitats, but as a rule they prefer coniferous forests. A black bear's diet consists of many things, including fruit, berries, nuts, leaves, roots, honey, insects and small animals. Other animals in the forest biome of the Sonoran Desert include mountain lions, gray foxes, white-tailed deer, red-tailed hawks, golden eagles and a variety of squirrels.

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