During my Utah vacation i planned things out so that with each new location i visited i would be higher. The idea was to make adjusting to the altitude as smooth as possible. I live at sea level so going to Zion and suddenly climbing around at 6,000 feet made things difficult. But after a few days of that, going to Bryce and walking up hills near 8,000 feet wasn't so bad. My last stop was Great Basin National Park and my main attraction for going was too see the Bristlecone Pine, the oldest living individual organisms on earth. These trees thrive at 10,000 feet in conditions so harsh nothing else can compete. My days of adjusting to higher altitudes really paid off by the time i arrived. I could feel the altitude but it wasn't any worse than i felt at Bryce, and i had adequate energy to enjoy the day even near treeline at 11,000 feet.
This thing could have been a seedling when primitive Egyptians were stacking rocks into simple geometric shapes and thinking it was important. If it could think it would never have guessed while it sat on it's silent slope, watching a glacier melt away, that millennia later those same creature's descendants might develop the technology to cross oceans, fill the night with light, and even gaze up at it's branches to give it a name using a dead language half it's age. The bulk of recorded history and development of human technology has occurred during this tree's lifetime. It is still growing, even after surviving clouds of radioactive fallout from the nearby atomic bombing up through the 1950's.
The Great Basin area includes all the land between the Sierra Nevadas and the Wasatch Range in Utah. In that area there are no rivers that drain into the ocean. Instead all water drains internally or ends up in what area usually salt lakes where it is trapped and evaporated. The Great Salt Lake, 150 miles away, stretched to within 10 miles of the park 12,000 years ago when it was known as Lake Bonneville. Today the high mountain ranges act as islands in the sky, isolated by impassable oceans of dry desert for the non airborne animals that live on them. That creates unique species differentiation between ranges. Gazing down on the Baker Basin from high up in the forests of the park it looks like the perfect place to land a space shuttle.
Even in the thick forest of Engelmann Spruce there is no vegetation on the ground more than a few feet from water sources. You can see where it suddenly ends on the opposite bank.
The park has the only glacier in the entire basin and range area but the real object of interest is the Bristlecones. The more i found out about the Bristlecone, the more amazed i became. The trees have several peculiar characteristics. They grow painfully slowly, 1/100th of an inch per year, making the wood extremely dense and hard for parasites to penetrate. The trees grow far enough apart that if a fire starts it cannot spread to other trees. Additionally, the bark is saturated with a preserving resin. The resin is so effective that dead trees will stand up for centuries without rotting. They are eventually destroyed in the same manner as rocks, eroding away due to the permanent forces of wind and ice. Researchers once found a piece of dead wood lying around that was 9,000 years old.
In an ironic twist, the harsher the spot in which the tree grows the longer the tree lives. The fastest growing, biggest of the Bristlecones at lower elevations only live a few hundred years. At the limit of their territory though, right at treeline at 11,000 feet, the trees, which look like they are in terrible health, can live longer than any other individual life from on the planet. Even the needles on the branches can live 40 years at a time. A tree was once found in the park that was 4,950 years old! That was after one of the most notable idiots in history cut it down just to count the tree rings. He killed the oldest thing on earth. Recently it has been reported that an even older tree has been found in the Inyo-White Mountains of California, but the location has been kept secret, for good reason.
The trees grow straight out of piles of rock. It can be difficult to even walk by one. Interestingly, they prefer Dolomite.
The previous evening there had been large thunderstorms over the park, so i wanted to get to the trees early in case that happened again. The air was crisp and cold but it was high enough that the all the gamma radiation from space kept me warm without a jacket. Along the way i met a gentleman from South Africa asking me if i'd seen a rare bird in the area. I've mentioned before i don't know anything about birds, so i wasn't any help to the guy. He gave me a lot of interesting information about travelling through the war torn, corrupt countries of Africa over the years that he'd been living there. Doing business and finding rental cars with gas in them sounds very crazy when there is 1,000% inflation going on.
The quaking aspen can grow in cloned colonies that are tens of thousands of years old, although no individual part of it as any older than normal.
Wheeler Peak in the background and the glacial basin.
The drought that had been plaguing the rest of the west for the last couple of years was evident here too. I went on another trail on the way back from the sad little glacier that took me by two lakes and a spring. The spring was dry and the lakes were incredibly low. The aspens were in full color though, and in general the park is exceptionally peaceful and quiet with very few visitors. I hear the marble caves are very nice too, and at night the place offers the clearest views of the stars in the country. I'd highly recommend it if you're looking for a quiet place to get away from it all. You'll notice the lack of any contrails in these images.
