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Salt Lake City, UT → Ely, NV 339.6 mi (546.5 km) |
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It’s going to be a great day, everyone!
After resting for a couple of days with my brother, Flatty, I’m back on the road and headed for a rare sight: Nevada’s only glacier in Nevada’s only national park! First, though, I couldn’t help but make a detour for some important history in Utah’s West Desert!
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The Topaz War Relocation Center was one of ten internment camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II. Like Manzanar and Tule Lake in California, this remote camp near Delta, Utah held up to 8,100 people, mostly taken from San Francisco, between September 11, 1942 and October 31, 1945. At the time, this camp counted as Utah’s fifth largest city!
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Today, very little remains of this 640-acre camp, except for some signs and the foundations of the old barracks. Each barrack was 20 feet by 120 feet and divided into six rooms with no running water, one light, and a coal stove to regulate temperatures that could swing between 100°F and 0°F depending on the time of year! Some folks got jobs here, while others went off to war while their families stayed at Topaz, but no one was allowed to return to California until January of 1945!
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After strolling the ruins, I realized it was afternoon, and I still had some ground to cover before dark! I hustled my way over to Baker, Nevada, just across the state line, and entered Great Basin National Park!
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Twelve miles up the Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive, I reached the Bristlecone-Alpine Lakes Trailhead, the start of an out-and-back jaunt that made no sense at all. The first sign said it was 4.6 miles roundtrip, but then a second sign said it was 3 miles just to the bristlecone forest! That meant I had to clear 6 miles in the four hours before dark. It was time to get hustling!
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Luckily for me, the trail had a pretty mellow start through gently sloping pine woods! The late afternoon offered up plenty of shade, so the temperature, already about twenty degrees cooler than in town, was super nice for hiking!
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A little past the one-mile mark, the trail started to switchback upward, and the forest thinned out. That’s where I started to catch glimpses of Great Basin’s famous, ancient bristlecones!
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What makes these eerie looking pines so famous? Well, they grow in super poor soil at super high altitudes, which makes them grow very, very slowly. Growing very, very slowly means they live a really long time! Some of these bristlecones are over 3,000 years old, but the oldest have reached 5,000! Bristlecones very rarely rot after they die, so their skeletons can stay standing and be polished by the elements for ages!
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Luckily for time management, the bristlecone trail was a really short detour, and soon enough, I was back on the Glacier Trail, ready for the final push. Not far from the bristlecones, all plant life started to dwindle, and the path got super rocky. I didn’t even realize I was so high up in elevation!
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About a mile up, I came to the amphitheater beneath Wheeler Peak, which I’ll tackle tomorrow, and it was spectacular!
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Up ahead, I could see tiny Rock Glacier, a far cry from Margerie Glacier or the unnamed glaciers of Antarctica, but it was something to see a glacier in the middle of Nevada’s desert! From where I was, it looked like a quick little jaunt, but boy, was I wrong!
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For starters, it was a scramble with no real designated path! Just look at the size of some of the rocks I had to scramble! On the bright side, every angle was just gorgeous, and it was hard not to just turn around and gawk every second of this last schlep.
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At last, I reached the glacier and assembled Señor Castorieti, who I’ve seen a lot of this year! He was also surprised to be on a glacier in the Nevada desert, but with his vast knowledge of the snows, he said it was one of the last traces of the Ice Age here in Nevada, dating back some 20-30 thousand years! Sadly, with the globe warming, it is likely to be gone in the next twenty years, so it’s a good thing we were able to enjoy it as part of the view right now.
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Where we were, at the base of the cliff turned out to be highly dangerous, with rocks careening down from the top all the time. In fact, as Señor Castorieti and I took in the views, one cracked down off the cliff and took him out! Poor Señor Castorieti! Since I can’t regenerate the way he can, and since night was fast approaching, I hustled out of the amphitheater as quick as I could! I’ll spend tonight in the Bristlecone Motel in Ely, then come back for another day of adventure in Great Basin National Park!
Nice to snow you!
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Total Ground Covered: 2,767.6 mi (4,454.0 km) |
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