Remember when you were a kid and someone taught you to count the seconds between the lightning flash and the thunderclap to work out how far away the storm was?
Thunder is the shockwave from lightning, moving at the speed of sound and never able to keep up with the light which moves at, well, the speed of light. When I was a kid these storms were usually a little way away, and a close one might have been heard two, or even just one, second after it was seen.
On this day up in the mountains of Great Basin National Park, I imagine it was just two, or even one, millisecond. Because that flash/bang was so loud and instantaneous, I was at least slightly surprised we were still standing after it hit. Mentally patting myself down for burns or broken bones, I thought of the ancient bristlecone trees we were trying to visit. They’d survived thousands of years in this little place. Surely we could survive a single afternoon?
How does any plant live for 5,000 years? That’s as old as Chinese imperial history, back to a dynasty that was until recently thought to be mythical, not real. A bristlecone pine that first sprouted 5,000 years ago entered a world where both Troy and Stonehenge were first built. It’s a long, long time ago. Imagine everything that’s happened since then: somehow a tree survived it all. Today, thanks to conservation efforts which will hopefully not be undone at the behest of some lobbyist for an extractive industry, small pockets of the bristlecone pines are still growing, slowly but surely. Several groves exist in the Great Basin National Park in Nevada. Had we not been a little spooked by the thunderstorm exploding literally on top of us, we’d have seen the easiest to reach of them that day. Instead, we beat a prudent retreat back downhill to the campsite where we huddled under our shelter and brewed coffee.
But as the kid liked to sing, “up came the sun, and dried poor Incy out”. So like Incy Wincy Spider, we climbed the hill again under a beautiful blue sky. Once we reached the mysterious bristlecone grove, we faced a second question. Even if we could answer how a tree lives for 5,000 years, how do you explain to a four year old just how incredibly long 5,000 years is?
Great Basin National Park
Great Basin National Park is in the middle of nowhere in Nevada. The state itself is probably fairly described in similar terms – compared to the rest of the United States, it’s squarely in the back blocks. This is one reason it’s so attractive – Glacier National Park, another famous park with alpine scenery, got nearly three million visitors in 2018. Great Basin had just 153,000 the same year. We visited in summer 2019, and easily found space in the first-in-first-served Wheeler Peak campground. The nearest “town” is Baker, literally a one street hamlet with a couple of restaurants and tiny hotels. The nearest center of any size is Ely, a good hour away by car. Around the little ecological island of the park is nothing but wide open plains. Looking around from the summit of Wheeler Peak, you feel like you’re on a tiny island in a huge ocean, staring out to other tiny islands far away.
Beautiful, small alpine lakes sat like little blue-green jewels in the grassy, forested shawl around Wheeler Peak’s shoulders. Deer roamed nearby. After the strenuous climb up the summit, even I, usually so resistant to cold water, stripped off to my trunks and had a quick swim in Stella Lake.
 Lunar Crater |
 Wheeler Peak |
 Area 51 |
Shoshone
Later we camped at a bare-bones campsite named Shoshone – a place I barely found reference to on the internet. This was a beautiful spot, with aspen groves and a clear, clean stream running past the campsite. A long dirt road provided access, and there was a gravel car park with an eco-toilet, but that was it. We saw a few cars of day hikers, but only one other pair camping. They were from Salt Lake City in Utah, to Nevada’s east, there to escape their town’s searing summer heat.
From Shoshone, we hiked to Johnson’s Mine, a ruined goldrush era homestead with some interesting old scrap metal lying around, all that remained of a gutsy effort to make a fortune many years ago. There were two routes, one passing so-called Dead Lake, another swinging around the other way through beautiful evergreens. The wildflowers were out, even a few hummingbirds, and it was quite simply glorious. Hard work though – it was a long, long hike and I carried the kid most of the way.
The fellow from Salt Lake was about 60, I’d guess, or 65. When I’d mentioned my telescope – a humble but family friendly six incher from Astronomy without Borders – he showed real interest and offered to let me have a look through his. I was expecting something bigger than mine, of course. (Are you laughing yet?) But when I got down to the gravel parking area it looked like he’d brought the Hubble Space Telescope flight back-up down from the Smithsonian in DC. That thing was massive. He and his wife’s pickup truck was totally devoted to astronomy, and the entire rear compartment was set aside for the telescope. Its mirror was a huge 18 inches, and the framework for it was easily taller than me. We saw distant, faint galaxies and nebula through that, and looked at Jupiter through mine. I asked him about seeing Jupiter through his, but he said it’d be so bright we’d go blind – okay then. At the end of the night, I quickly tossed my scope in the back of the car. He and his wife wrangled that thing for fifteen minutes, rolling it up two special ramps on a tailor-made dolly, sealing it as safe inside as a satellite in the cargo bay of the space shuttle.
Baker, Nevada
Small places have the best gossip. Baker proved that, and added that the smaller the place, the better the gossip. Just 68 people resided there according to the 2010 census, but it felt even smaller. There was a gas station with no staff, a small grocery store, a couple of tiny hotels, and an incredibly incongruous hip eatery called Kerouac’s. That place sold food that you’d be happy to eat in the biggest US cities, much less somewhere quite literally in the middle of nowhere.
But underneath, there was intrigue, politics, vendettas, scheming. All of it. One person has bought up most of the vacant lots around town, and did everything he could to prevent anyone else opening up. The potential was there – the National Park is seeing a lot of growth, around 20,000 more visitors each year. But without access to land, there was no way anyone else could start a new business. Grass roots politics is raw and brutal.
Bristlecone Pines
But back to those trees. High up above the green hillsides of the lower slopes of Wheeler Peak’s surrounding mountains, and near Pyramid Peak, the evergreens give way to rocky slopes generally bare of trees. But here and there, ancient and mysterious trees grow in secretive groves – Bristlecone Pines. These trees – Pinus longaeva to give them their proper name – live just about forever. Trees in the easy-to-reach grove above Wheeler Peak campground have been dated back to 1150 BCE – that’s nearly 3,200 years. Even writing this, it’s inconceivable that a tree could be that old. Seeing it in front of you, thinking of all that’s happened on Earth in that time, or indeed in the United States in just one tenth of that time, it’s even harder to fathom. How can a tree live that long and not get chopped down by humans? I mean, that’s the real mystery, right there. Storms, fire, avalanche, earthquake – I suppose the odds of surviving all that nature can throw at you for three millennia are not bad. But people? How did we not chop these things down for a coffee table or firewood?
In US federal lands, at least, the tree is protected, and even collecting the pine cones is illegal. So while the populations are small, they are stable, and because they are carefully studied, they can be listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) “least concern” list. Let’s hope it stays that way.
Being there, especially once the few others present hiked downhill, felt like a great honour. This place was old, really old, and I felt like I didn’t belong. No-one did. This place felt like it had always been old, never changing, just existing, more or less forever. It was about the closest I think one could feel to being a real time traveller, stepping out onto an ancient Earth hitherto unburdened by humans.
And then we left that timeless little oasis of peace, back down into the desert with its gun toting hermits, its small town monopolists, its out of place hipster restaurants, and headed north to Ely. From there, it was west, deeper into the desert, towards alien territory.
