Pacific Crest Trail - Day 70

Start: Mile 729.1 - Backcountry campsite
End: Mile 748.0 - Poison Meadow Spring - 10,719'

Any day you see a Bristlecone Pine is a good day.

We had the pleasure to climb through a forest of them admiring their beautiful adaptive resiliency. In a modern world that largely equates beauty with fashionable conformity, the Bristlecone Pine thrives in harsh forms in harsh environments in harsh conditions. Beautiful.

There’s a story of a graduate student who killed the (at the time) oldest known lifeform on the planet when he cut down a Bristlecone Pine in Great Basin National Park in Nevada. 5,000 years old! That tree represented nearly 200 generations of us short-sighted plundering bumbling idiots. Anyway, the hot new thneed is out in 17 fresh new summer colors.

I don’t even understand how this happens. Like a switchback on a trail, perhaps the twist acts as a simple mechanism to lessen the vertical burden on nutrients carried by the xylem up a vertical cylinder?

My buddy Pierre’s dad Paul used to drive us to Little League games in his approximately 1978 Toyota Tercel hatchback with a “Save the Owens Valley” bumper sticker. We’d listen to Jon Miller call Giants games on AM radio. He loaned me Hank Aaron’s autobiography I had a hammer which was my introduction to American systemic racism that was largely “absent” (and I later realized, perpetuated) in my white rural Nevadan upbringing.

Owens ”Lake” is now a dust bowl as water from the Eastern Sierra valley that rests directly between Death Valley, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Yosemite National Parks is diverted to Los Angeles and big agricultural irrigation in surrounding areas. The dust bowl of Owens Lake is an impeccable representation of the arrogance of previous generations that we now inherit.

Humanity critically exists on a foundation of nature formed by the ”simplest” bacteria to the most fearsome apex predators. We’ll remove important migratory wetlands for palm trees in Santa Monica, pools in Hollywood, or citrus groves near Bakersfield and wonder why birds aren’t singing and bees aren’t buzzing.

Go home, tree. You’re drunk.

A wooden octopus threatening to drown us in Davy Jones’ Locker.

Beautiful high Sierra meadows.

I learned that these twilight sunbeams are called Crepuscular Rays from a great guy named Joe who managed large-scale concrete projects in Boston.