A distant White Mountain Peak, framed by Bristlecone branches
You can discover life’s meaning gift-wrapped in a spiny sheath, deep inside a cone that falls from a Bristlecone Pine.
A bold statement, yeah?
And yet, it fits. Because these trees are bold. As they must be, to thrive for millennia in a lofty, bleak, high desert home on the California-Nevada border.
But their mainstay isn’t ostentation. Their boldness seems to be of a rare, soft-spoken type. They manifest an inner power, a durable optimism, a kind of undaunted persistence. That’s the very strength that has transformed them, over many centuries, into living monuments of endurance.
Bristlecones don’t boast the dancing, lacy, fog-spearing, tall spires of a coastal redwood grove. They never approach the mammoth girth of a sequoia giganteum. They can’t propagate a lush or dense forest in the way that acorn-raining valley oaks do.
But what they can do is display a rugged virtue at the core of Earth’s life-force—a determination to not give up.
SEEING FROM A HUNTER’S BLIND
When I first traveled up to these Bristlecone groves, oh, about thirty years ago, I didn’t come to visit trees. My main mission was to make a round-trip trek to the high point of that whole ‘hood: the summit of White Mountain Peak.
Let’s take a moment to place the region in context. Now, overall lay of that landscape looks this-a-way.
The Sierra-Nevada is California’s major mountain range, a granitic behemoth some 400 miles in length and 70 miles wide. At the midpoint of the Sierra, and running southward on its east side, the terrain slopes steeply down to the Owens Valley. Over on the far side of that valley rears up a smaller, volcanic chain, the Whites, only 60 miles long and averaging 10 miles wide. Yet it’s still distinguished by a 14,252-foot summit, our state’s third tallest peak.
When you see that noble summit rear up high against a turquoise desert sky, it seems to dare you to climb it. I mean, it certainly did produce that effect on me. I imagined a big part of its allure was a prospect of the 360-degree views I thought I could score from atop that peak—a sort of God’s-eye perspective on the whole region.
I sought to acclimatize myself to White Mountain Peak’s altitude by scampering around for a few hours at a saddle in the approach ridge. This is an area adjacent to the trailhead that starts a 7.5-mile route to the summit. During my ramble, I discovered some rings of stacked rock built by the Owens Valley Paiute tribal hunters. Those structures were once used as blinds for hunting high desert bighorn sheep.
I hunkered myself down in one ring to conjure up what those bygone days might’ve felt like. Paiute survival probably meant making determined use of every natural resource. As each winter drew to a close, the tribes broke camp down on the Owens River, then ascended some 7,000 feet into the Whites to set up a summer camp. Here, they’d harvest nuts from piñon cones and strive to coax bighorns within bowshot. That sort of life was hard, so the people perforce became hardy, in order to cope.
And that was my gateway into contemplating topics other than my bagging of White Mountain Peak. The Paiute life cycle accommodated itself to the seasons. So, when ice-and-snow storms began to blast the high ridges, they trekked back down to the valley. But how did the entities that couldn’t depart manage to survive? Now, I felt myself growing more curious about some of the Bristlecone groves I’d driven right past on my way up. I decided to go visit them prior to making a summit hike.
A SESSION WITH NOBLE ANCESTORS
A pair of groves up here do greet visitors with pathways and signage: the Patriarch Grove, at 11,300 feet of elevation; and then, twelve miles downhill, one finds the Schulman Grove near the Forest Service’s visitor center at 10,100 feet. The latter features a 4.5 mile-long loop hike that wends its way past Methuselah—currently the oldest known living Bristlecone, nearing some 5,000 years of age. Meaning, this tree already was flourishing as a robust sapling way back when humans began building the Great Pyramid at Giza, around 2,600 BC.
Those established visitor walkways in the groves make foot travel easy. However, I felt a hankering to connect with Bristlecones in the wild, so to speak. Thus, I left all beaten paths behind to bushwhack over hill and dale till I came across a group of aged trees with no sign that any tourist had ever traipsed among them. Here, I sat down cross-legged and tried to coax my mind into some sense of what it might feel like to be an ancient tree.
I could smell a resinous spice in the air, which is an important potion in a Bristlecone’s charmed life. That strong resin repels insects and protects the trees against fungus and rot. Next to me lay a slab that had fallen away from an eroded trunk. When I hefted one end, it seemed to hold the weight of a hunk of metal of similar size. This is another attribute. Slow growth produces extremely dense wood with an iron-like durability—crucial, if you’re going to stand up against earthquakes and landslides, drought and deluge, plus a few thousand years of thrashings by winter storms.
The earth under and around me appeared chalky, due to the expansive rubble of dolomite, a sedimentary rock formed on old sea beds. Some of this range is volcanic in origin—White Mountain Peak itself is an expired volcano—but those dolomite patches were brought along, aboard the general landscape uplift. Which is still underway, by the way; the highest summit continues to reach for the sky at a rate of about a foot of rise per millennium.
While not everything grows well in dolomitic soil, Bristlecones truly love this stuff. So, the gleam of dolomite suggests another portion of the secret of their success—up here, they need to compete far less for nutrients and sunshine upon their chosen turf.
I began to admire the colors and textures of the Bristlecone nearest me, the sinuous turnings of its worn, exposed wood, rising like a frozen golden flame from the pale hearth of the hillside. At first glance, this tree looked almost dead. But then I noticed it still boasted one ribbon of living bark that snaked up its side to nurture a last twig with green needles from which dangled a single verdant cone.
“Well look at you,” I told the tree. “Still sexy, after all these years.”
PEEKS FROM A PEAK EXPERIENCE
I did reach the summit of White Mountain Peak during that visit, and upon a subsequent tour that took place some twenty years later, when I invited my wife to come along to share a repeat of the adventure. We got treated to splendid views, a full moon setting over the Sierra, and abundant wildlife sightings that happened to include raucous ravens, yellow-bellied marmots, startingly blue butterflies, and even a small, ewe-led herd of desert bighorn sheep.
It was intriguing to think about the strategies that enabled these creatures to survive and thrive in such a challenging environment. But to me, the real head-stretcher still remains the Bristlecones’ immense capacity to endure while rooted in place. It’s a different way to face the onslaught of time: to simply dig in, take whatever comes, and refuse to give up.
Back in the days of wooden ships and iron men, the hearty deckhands scampering around on the rigging amid a heavy blow had to pay heed to the letters tattooed on the backs of their knuckles: “h-o-l-d f-a-s-t.” Or on land, during the Great Depression and the Dustbowl tragedies, a Midwest watchword was, “Grab a root and growl.” It was a motto for those who fully intended to persevere.
And that to me is precisely the same lesson the Bristlecones offer us, in spades. No matter how fraught or tumultuous our modern times may get, a mindset can exist that shall powerfully see us through, if we nurture it, if we stay determined to have it flourish. It is composed of acceptance of challenge and insistence upon survival. It does not deny any wounds of the past, but surmounts them, to emerge from this life-long battle endowed with a much stronger if somewhat stranger beauty.
PASSING ALONG A POSTSCRIPT
After my first visit to the Whites, I had the occasion to write a lengthy and heartfelt letter to an old friend, one I hadn’t seen since my teen years. And here’s my favorite passage from that missive…
“I don’t think we humans progress through life as anyone might through a long hall lined with rooms. That, as we shut one door to open another, we are utterly done with the past, and thus find ourselves thoroughly inhabiting novelty. Rather, I think we more resemble a Bristlecone pine, which drives its roots down into rocky soils of the high desert, and lives and endures, bearing every blessing or insult that time delivers, ineluctably written into its resinous fibers.
“And so, after the passage of millennia, after weather and avalanches and geologic shifts over centuries, after ice storms and dust storms and frosts, withering heat, deluges and drought, a visitor might observe that the once green and supple twig has become a gnarled and twisted giant, with exposed grain of its long-dead wood sand-blasted by prevailing winds hurling grit, while one narrow strip of living bark yet rises to the remnant branch, sporting, as a kind of hopeful gesture, a few verdant needles and one last, fertile cone.
“All of that being’s history is upheld in each line of its eroded form. It is ongoing life and glory and history and damage and hope all writ together.”
