The Highest Place—The Oldest Trees

Mt. Charleston

Today, I set out for the summit of Mt. Charleston.  The mountain elevates itself above the desert to a poetic symbol of imagination, defying the notion that such a mountain could not exist in a dry desert.

Just forty miles from Las Vegas, a range of mountains rises so high that their highest peak is far above the sky islands that dot the Mojave desert, including the Mid Hills that I explored yesterday.  If anyone thinks that rising above all that is visible, above where trees and bushes grow, being higher than humans can normally exist, is worth the trouble, then read on.  If it’s merely another mountain peak for you, please endure the rest of us who normally bend our minds to such a goal and glory over our deeds in hiding.

Mt. Charleston is such a destination—highest mountain in southern Nevada, slightly higher than Mt. San Gorgonio in Southern California.  But reaching the “highest” is not why I attempted the summit.  In preparation for Mt. Charleston, I made an attempt on Mt. San Gorgonio this summer.  If you missed my blog post, it’s still here; just scroll down.  It concludes with a failed attempt at the summit, complete with adequate excuses.

In simple terms it’s like climbing a ladder almost a mile high, a four-thousand-foot vertical climb, and eight miles horizontal from trailhead to summit. 

The Trailhead

I drove northwest from Las Vegas forty miles, leaving the desert and entering lush, green Kyle Canyon in the Spring Mountains.  I parked at the Trail Canyon Trailhead, ready and excited to begin.  

Looking down at the trailhead

Soon I had moved above civilization and was looking down on that little red-roof building at the trailhead.

 Aspens last year in 
Rocky Mountain National Park

Aspens on the way to Mt. Charleston

Into the aspen trees at eight thousand feet, green and fully-leafed in summer’s end.  But remember how they looked in Rocky Mountain National Park last year near Grand Lake, Colorado, when their colors had turned from ordinary to extravagant.  

This is not Mt. Charleston,
but a small unnamed peak
along the way.

After two miles, Trail Canyon joins North Loop Trail.

Ever uphill, I would reach the far ridge, again not Mt. Charleston, and follow the ridge the rest of the way.

Having almost gained the ridge, look with me back into Kyle Canyon, where the red-roof building at the trailhead is barely visible.  It seems impossible that I could have come so high.  I’m not that strong.  Seeing evidence of things impossible is one of the reasons I continue up and up.

See how the limestone layers were forced and bent from their original horizontalness by time and pressure.  Tiny crustaceans died here by the trillions in a long-past ocean.  They could not have imagined themselves here, raised up high and admired, even if they could have thought.  

Here on the ridge leading to Mt. Charleston, stand some of the world’s oldest trees.  Some of them are older than the redwoods, at over five thousand years—the stately and gracefully aged bristlecone pines.   

Their wood resists decay and their inhospitable homeland resists human degradation.  So the wood erodes by wind and weather, rather than rot, for centuries after the trees die, sculpted by an artist.  

I visit the old ones to learn the art of graceful weathering. 

A young bristlecone pine as one of these old-timers must have looked when the pyramids of Egypt were being built.   

See the trail winding up to the summit.

In the last three miles, Mt. Charleston shows herself—bare and wild above anything that grows, alone and in good spirits for a visitor today. 

The summit is bare and rocky—a small radio repeater, a survey marker, but not much else.  An excavated pit provides some shelter from the wind, a place where you can hole up and wait out a storm.  But the floor is rocky, and it would be a sleepless night.  Today the mountain is friendly and warm.  

I could find a lifeless pile of rocks like this down on the desert and drive right up to it.  Not for the destination is the effort worthwhile, but for the journey.

Fire burned, wind eroded, nutrient starved, the bristlecones, living and dead and both together in the same tree, trudge through the ages and through my imagination, as I descend, braking back down below them.  Their country is too high for me, their lives too long.  

I visited a bare mountain island wearing a skirt of forest, surrounded at her feet by a sea of desert.

A note about the pictures:  You can enlarge any picture by clicking on it.  Then, click the “back” button to return to where you were.