Visit to the Bristlecone Pines

Visit to the Bristlecone Pines

Today we drove up on a nearby mountain to see the Bristlecone Pines, a set of trees may be a thousand years old or more. Here is a typical example:

We had driven west through Bicknell, and here is the view up to where we were, perhaps on that flat area just under the peak, just to the right of the puffy cloud behind the peak, perhaps close to 8000 feet.

From on top, looking down into Rabbit Valley. To the right you can see the town of Lyman, and beyond that, the county seat of Wayne County, Loa. The little early town of Fremont is just out of this photo to the right.

A few hundred feet behind this, and looking to the left, we are looking back at Boulder Mountain, and if you know where to look, you can see the road up to Annette and Larry's house, right of center.

The road directly in front goes down to service a spring that supplies water to Bicknell, the town directly below, just a bit to the right. Turning around from here, the next photo shows the end of the road into this area (we did use the 4 wheel drive, a bit, on the way up).

Back to the "signal tree" - Annette took this photo of Nancy and I just to the right of that tree. The other interesting part of this photo, is to look at the snow, just to the left of Nancy's hat - that is Hilgard mountain, where we were stopped by the snow a couple of days back!

One nice part of this area, is there is enough flat area that Nancy could walk around a bit, without getting too winded, even at the high altitude. She was careful and did well. Here she and Annette looking out into Rabbit Valley, and you can see some of the other area around us.

The "walking around" area was also a good example of the delicate nature of the sandy soil. Scattered about, were little clumps of vegetation - here one of them was blooming; little white flowers. We tried not to step on them.

After a bit, we got out the chairs, each found a spot, and took the time to sketch, write or whatever seemed the right thing to do, individually. Here are the four spots - I took this photo, so my chair is empty.

Here I am, sketching the tree in my sketch book.

Nancy had been sketching, but here is composing a neat poem she shared with us.

Annette sketched, Larry made entries in his hiking journal. On the way out, we made one stop, to take a photo of some red Indian Paint Brush by a rock.

Another very nice day, all around.  ;-)