A road takes those willing to negotiate hairpin curves at high elevation with not much room between the road's edge and empty space over two-thirds of the way up the mountain. From there, one hike leads to the bristlecone pine grove and remnants of an ice age glacier, another to the top of Wheeler Peak three thousand feet up. I wanted to see both, but settled for the shorter, easier trail to the wise old trees and withered glacier when I arrived. The trail also passes idyllic Teresa Lake.
The lesson I took from the bristlecones is that to live in difficult terrain you must also die. The tree's secret is knowing when to let go of certain branches. While parts of each tree are alive, other parts are dead. In concentrating on the branches most likely to survive, fortifying and nourishing them while abandoning weaker, less critical limbs, bristlecones are able to endure the intense wind, heat, cold, fire, and ice that fells so many other trees after a few hundred years.
I camped out in the park most of the way down the mountain because the mountain campsite at the end of the road was full, but woke up early the next morning, drove back up the mountain as high as the road would take me, and then trudged to the summit of Wheeler Peak.
It's a grinding hike in which you feel like you're getting closer only to have the summit snatched away by a new summit appearing above you that had been hidden by the angle, steeper and rockier and hundreds of feet higher. That just makes the views from the top all the more rewarding.
Done hiking before noon, I began the three and a half hour drive to Salty Lake City through Utah's topsy-turvy Confusion Range then past Lake Sevier, which isn't actually a lake but the salty carcass of a lake that has been sucked dry by the desert aridity. I spent the night in Salt Lake City and drove the rest of the way back to Denver the next day, Independence Day.
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