Fall Colors and Goofy Kids

Two weekends ago, the kids and I went for a quick trip up the Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive in Great Basin National Park. We stopped at Mather Overlook to enjoy the views, and the kids were instantly drawn to the telescopes, although they had to get creative to get high enough to look through them.

 We could see a sprinkling of color on the mountain as the quaking aspens started turned yellow.

 The kids weren't so interested in the views. They were ready to play. And Desert Boy's cowboy hat provided the entertainment they needed.

 Desert Girl wanted to give it a try.

 Oh, goodness. Can you tell that Desert Girl enjoys having her photo taken?

 Sorry for the kid photo overload, but I just couldn't resist with their expressions.

 It's so nice to go hiking with them when they're in a good mood!

Next we drove to the end of the road. I let the kids choose which trail they wanted to see, and they chose the quarter-mile Island Forest Trail. Despite being the shortest trail, it still took us about an hour!

 Our slow progress was the result of looking closely at lots of things, like the Engelmann spruce pine cones.

 And taking time out to pose by some aspens. With our tongues out.

 And lie on the ground.

 I tried taking some artistic shots from interesting angles, but really didn't do that well. This is one of the better photos.

 The goofy kids kept coming up with new games. (If you're wondering about the red bag, it's what Desert Boy decided to carry instead of a backpack. I don't think it had much useful in it, but he carried it the whole way, so I didn't care.)

 Then a big cloud came overhead and released some sleet. That provided a bit of excitement.

 A few minutes later, the sun was out, highlighting the golden aspens.

The colors along the Scenic Drive seemed more muted this year. In my next post, I'll show what they looked like a week later (this past weekend).

Where do you like to go to look at fall colors?

Great Basin National Park 2013 Astronomy Festival

Last weekend was Great Basin National Park's Astronomy Festival. I was really looking forward to it (and it was a self-imposed deadline to get up some astronomy-related road art). 

On Thursday night we attended the ranger talent show. The ranger acts all had an astronomy theme.

Some kids I know opened the show with their rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. 

 
It was just a little bit cute. Okay, maybe a lot. Desert Girl made sure she was holding her star!

 Other talents showcased included beautiful singing, violin, guitars, trumpet, a reading, and a Star Wars skit with awesome costumes. It was a really enjoyable evening. (I had the wrong lens and no tripod so stopped trying to take photos as the sky got darker and darker.)

Then we headed over to the picnic area and looked through a variety of telescopes at the amazing night sky. It was a cloudless night and quite warm, ideal conditions. It was nice having the Astronomy Festival in the fall so we didn't have to stay up so late to see the night sky.

Desert Boy really wanted to get his Dark Sky Certificate because the prize was a Milky Way candy bar. In order to earn it, he had to look through telescopes and spot a binary star,  a galaxy, a star cluster, and a planetary nebula.

For the binary star, we looked to the oldest known one, in the handle of the Big Dipper. This has been a test for good eyesight for ages--can you see that the second star in the handle is not one star, but two? These are Mizar and Alcor (and recently discovered several more stars).

The galaxy we looked at was our nearest spiral galaxy neighbor: the Andromeda Galaxy. When you think about how big the Milky Way galaxy is and that we just see a portion of it, it's pretty amazing that we can see a whole other galaxy out there with its billions of stars. When I think of geologic time as being overwhelming, I just remind myself that it has nothing on astronomy, where a distance of 2.5 million light years to the Andromeda Galaxy is considered close. It certainly helps me put life in perspective--we really are little specks, and we might as well get along!

A star cluster is a bunch of stars close together, but much, much smaller in number than a galaxy. To put this in perspective, a star cluster may "only" have hundreds of thousands of stars in it. Or perhaps several million. But it's still not anywhere close to a galaxy. Oh, my. We looked at the best known star cluster in the northern hemisphere, M13, in the constellation Hercules.

Finally we looked at a planetary nebula. I thought it was rather difficult to be able to spot planets outside our solar system, so I asked what a planetary nebula was. The astronomer explained that the old-time astronomers, who didn't have such good telescopes, thought they were seeing planets forming. In fact, they were seeing dying stars. One day our sun will become a planetary nebula. These are relatively rare, with only 1500 known. And the one we saw, the Dumbbell Nebula, was gorgeous, my favorite sight of the night. In fact, it inspired me so much that I went home and looked up more information about planetary nebulas, started watching a BBC shown on astronomy called The Planets, and made me go back to the Astronomy Festival to learn even more.

 Unfortunately the weather didn't cooperate. It was cloudy and stormy Friday night. And much of Saturday. But we decided to head to the ranger programs in the afternoon and learned about telescopes and how to use a planisphere. The kids' favorite activity was making a solar bracelet.

Ranger Aileen explained how the sun emits lots of different colors, and the kids identified the colors. She then told them how below the violet light is another kind of light, one we can't see, called ultra violet. It's the one that can make our skin tan (or sunburned).

She had some special beads that would turn color only in ultraviolet light. So inside a building the beads would be clear, but outside they would magically transform in color.

The kids loved the hands on activity. Even Desert Girl was able to make her own bracelet.

We had to wait a bit to get some good sunlight to make the beads their brightest. We sure were impressed with how much they changed color!

The astronomy festival was lots of fun despite some not-so-ideal weather conditions. One other thing I should mention is that Wally Pacholka was the keynote speaker. He gave up his day job as an accountant to take photos of the night skies. He had some photographs for sale, and I couldn't resist--they are stunning. Check out his website to see his remarkable work.

Great Basin National Park also released its Astronomy Ranger Minute, which has some amazing videography.

We're already looking forward to next year's Astronomy Festival! The date has been set for September 19-21, 2014.

A Trip up Wheeler Peak, Great Basin National Park

Last week I had the opportunity to climb several mountains as part of the GLORIA project, a world-wide project that is looking at climate change by studying how plant species are changing on mountain tops over the long term. The basic idea is that as the climate warms, plants will have to move upward in elevation to survive. Eventually they will reach the top of the mountain, have no where else to go, and will disappear. Yikes!

One of the four peaks we studied was Wheeler Peak, at 13, 063 feet the second highest peak in the state of Nevada. The hike is 4.1 miles long starting from the Wheeler Peak summit trailhead at about 10,000 feet. To get to the trailhead, you simply enter Great Basin National Park via Nevada Highway 488, then take the Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive about 12 miles to the sign.

After a briefing about possible dangers (lightning, altitude sickness, hypothermia, tripping and falling, dehydration, etc.), we set off through the aspen groves on a rather flat section of trail.

After a mile, we reached the second trail junction, with Stella Lake nearby and the summit of Wheeler Peak only 3.1 miles away. Only. Ha.

The trail gets progressively steeper, and the peak still looks far away! Wheeler Peak is the high peak on the right, while Jeff Davis is on the left and stands about 400 feet lower. Wheeler Peak is named for Lieutenant George Wheeler, who summited and surveyed the peak in 1869 as part of an Army mapping expedition. For more on the history and climbing the peak, see the highly recommended  Great Basin National Park: A Guide to the Park and Surrounding Area. (Disclosure: I wrote it, so of course I highly recommend it!)

Before long we were above treeline and following switchbacks up the talus. Although we were gaining 3,000 feet, before the Scenic Drive existed, people would either ride horses up part way or start hiking about where the Upper Lehman Campground is, just short of 8,000 feet. And Wheeler started in Spring Valley at 6,000 feet, for a 7,000 foot elevation gain. (albeit with a horse for part of the way!).

More than half way up is a giant shoulder that is sort of flat. Some big wind breaks have been created. The wind sure can blow up here, and it's usually cold! Be sure to bring some extra layers.

During our rest break, I found one lonely little snow cinquefoil flower (Potentilla nivea). The rest of the flowers are wrinkled up and barely noticeable.

As we continued up, I commented on the flat areas with no vegetation. usually vegetation seems to like the flatter areas. I learned that these may be periglacial features. The movement of the ground due to freezing and thawing keeps it unsteady (or something like that, I'm not entirely clear about periglacial features).

A lot of planes fly over Wheeler Peak, and that particular day the contrails were staying put, giving an idea of just how many fly over in a short amount of time. Across the valley I saw my first ever contrail shadow.


A skunky-smell started permeating the air, and I looked around closely to find skunkweed or sky pilot (Polemonium viscosum). Beautiful purple flowers are suspended on some stinky upreaching leaves.

Then came a surprising sight: Parry's primrose (Primula parry). This species usually grows next to streams (the inlet to nearby Teresa Lake is a beautiful spot). Somehow, these flowers have been able to adapt to live in the alpine environment.

Although the oxygen became more limited the higher we went, the views kept improving. Soon we reached the summit and could look over the mountain top.

From the top we had the glorious view of the south Snake Range, beginning with the North Fork of Baker Creek, and continuing down to Pyramid Peak (it really does look like a pyramid!), Mt. Washington (the light gray peak), and Granite Mountain in the far distance.

Up on the summit are several round shelters. These just aren't for sheltering day hikers, they were used as part of a heliograph station to map the 39th parallel. They have a really interesting history (see Chapter 5 in the Great Basin book).

We began our vegetation resurveys on the west shoulder of Wheeler Peak, which has less disturbance. We used a variety of different survey types to document what vegetation is present. We also retrieved data loggers to find out what the temperature has been like for the past five years. Over the next months, that data will be studied to make some preliminary conclusions. Five years really isn't much time to see huge changes in plant communities, although we did see a couple of ferns that weren't spotted last time.

This rockslide yellow fleabane (Erigeron leiomerus) was outside of our survey area, but was one of the few plants still flowering. Due to our very dry conditions this year, most flowers were past their prime.

During a break, I walked to the far east edge of Wheeler Peak's summit to get a view of the rock glacier in the cirque below. Check out this post for a close-up view of the rock glacier.

I really wanted to see the glacier at the headwall, so I moved closer, and was stunned when I realized that the ice ascended nearly all the way up the steep face. It looks so much different than from down n the glacier. The slope is covered in dust, gravel, and rock, but it's smooth surface left no doubt that it's ice. I felt a moment of realization that this really could be a glacier. (I will admit that I've been a doubter, even though Osborn and Bevis have declared it a glacier in scientific literature.)

One of the definitions of a glacier is that it must be moving, and crevasses (cracks in the ice) show that the ice is moving. I zoomed in for a closer look at the crevasses. It would be kind of cool to get really close with an ice axe, rope, and crampons, and check them out more. The only problem is that there is so much rock fall off the Prospect Mountain Quartzite--hence the very dirty glacial ice.

Then it was time to get back to work looking at plants. The Ross' avens (Geum rossii) with its yellow flowers is one of the most common plants on all the peaks we looked at.

I only found a few cushion phlox (Phlox pulvinata) in bloom during the trip; most of the flowers had already disappeared.


We finished our work in the mid afternoon. Before heading down, I took a photo looking east, over Garrison in Snake Valley and the Burbank Hills to the Confusion/Wah Wah Range and beyond. If you know the area, can you spot Crystal Peak?

The afternoon heat allowed for a wildfire to the northeast of Spring Valley to produce an impressive smoke column. We also saw a lot of dust kicked up on Yelland Dry Lake bed. During the spring, the playa will be covered with water, but for most of the year it is dry and dusty. Many people fear that more of Spring Valley will become like Yelland Dry Lake bed due to a massive groundwater pumping project by Southern Nevada Water Authority that is expected to significantly drop the groundwater level in the valley and change the plant composition.

It took me about three hours to hike up Wheeler Peak (with people in our group both ahead and behind), and about two hours to hike down. It was a beautiful day to go up to the highest point in this part of the world.

Hope you enjoyed seeing some of the views! What's your favorite peak to hike?

A Trip up Mount Washington

Ready for a road trip? We're going to head up the west side of the South Snake Range to Mt. Washington in Great Basin National Park. It's a long trip (and a long post), but it's worth it! The road goes nearly to the top of the mountain, but the road is not the easiest to drive. Think switchbacks that are so steep you have to do three-point turns to go up some of them. This is a section my dad would rather get out and walk. (Dad, you have to come visit sometime in summer so you can see for yourself!) 

The trip starts from Nevada Highway 894 (a spur off US Highway 93 in Spring Valley),  opposite from the Pickering Ranch. The unmarked gravel road goes up the bench (in other places it would be called the alluvial fan), crossing from sagebrush to pinyon and juniper. Up in the pinyon-juniper, the road starts switchbacking, but is still passable to passenger cars up to the Pole Canyon adit of the Mount Wheeler mine at 7850 feet. The adit is over a mile long. Water flows out from the entrance (see photo above), but I've heard that it contains heavy metals so isn't recommended for drinking.

This beautiful swallowtail was enjoying the coolness of the water.

Several structures still stand from when this mine was in action, in the late 1940s and 1950s. Beryllium and tungsten were the primary targets. (You can find more information in Chapter 20 of Great Basin National Park: A Guide to the Park and Surrounding Area--link in the sidebar to the right).

From the adit, the road becomes much more of an adventure. It was made as a jeep road in 1948. High clearance and four wheel drive are required. A chainsaw wouldn't be a bad idea, as we didn't get too far up the road until we found this:

We didn't have a chainsaw. Or a handsaw. Or a hatchet. But fortunately there were three of us, and through brute strength we were able to roll that tree off to the side of the road.

Then came the numerous switchbacks. I was busy driving so didn't manage to get any photos of them. I don't know if you could capture them well on photo--they are definitely an experience!

A bit further on we reached the small sign informing us that we were entering Great Basin National Park. The road crosses the park part of the time. The other time it's on private land owned by LongNow, a foundation interested in the very long perspective. (See their website for more.)

From up on the cliff we had super views of the switchbacks we had just traversed, Spring Valley, and the Schell Range.

Located along the cliff edge were bristlecone pines. Bristlecone pines are a great way to think of a longer perspective. Needles stay on the trees for 40 years. The harsher the climatic conditions, the longer the tree grows--one was found nearby that was about 5,000 years old (and then it was cut down, but that's a story for another day).

There's a lot of concern about bristlecone pines and other five-needle pines due to the combination of mountain pine beetle (MPB) and white pine blister rust.  MPB is a native beetle that has benefited from climate change. In some areas, instead of completing one life cycle in two years, it may do it in just a year. That means lots more beetles, and all those beetles need something to eat. As they eat the trees, the trees die. In normal years, a few trees die every year from MPB. When epidemics occur, and MPB beetle populations are especially high, nearly entire forests can die, although MPB generally just attacks trees greater than six inches diameter, so at least the young trees are spared.

However, the non-native white pine blister rust is spreading. It can attack trees of any age and kill them. Some trees are naturally resistant, but those trees may still be susceptible to MPB. It's a nasty one-two punch that has nearly wiped out whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis), the predominant tree near treeline in the northern Rockies. In some areas, more than 90% of the population has been decimated, and the tree was petitioned for listing under the Endangered Species Act. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared it warranted but precluded in 2011, meaning that it deserves protection but that the staff and money don't exist to do that. In Canada, it's been listed as endangered.

What about the bristlecone pine? Could it suffer such a fate? That's not known. For now, some proactive measures are being taken. A number of seeds were collected several years ago and are being tested for white pine blister rust resistance at the Dorena Genetic Resource Center. The main test takes seven years. If the tree shows resistance, more seeds can be collected to protect the genetic material, and if needed, help restore populations. But what happens if mountain pine beetle attacks the tree during those seven years, and the tree's not around to produce more resistant seeds? That's where our trip came in. We were putting pheromone pouches containing the chemical verbenone on the selected trees. Verbenone is what the mountain pine beetles send out to tell other beetles that the tree is full. It basically is the "Stay out, we're full," signal. If MPB populations aren't too high, the beetles are tricked and stay away. If they are high, nothing can really be done. But we do what we can, in the hopes that we can help this majestic species.

The trees we were visiting were scattered, which meant we had more higher up the mountain.

Further up the road, we took a side trip to some historic cabins. These were made by miners. Guess what trees they used. If you guessed bristlecones, you're right! These bristlecones are taller than the really old ones, mostly due to a gentler climate--not as much wind.

You can tell that the cabins are really old by the construction style. They didn't use nails to put these logs together--they built these cabins lincoln-log style.

Oops, I got distracted by a pretty penstemon with a pollinator in it.

Did the miners get distracted by the flowers? It must have been quite a hard life to get up there and then mine at such a high elevation. Then they had to get the ore off the mountain. One account says that they waited for winter and used toboggans to get the ore down.


Near the cabins is a thick metal cable. It goes down into the canyon. I decided to see what it was connected to up on the mountain.

First I found a huge pulley, probably ten inches in diameter, up high in a bristlecone. The chain holding the pulley in place is starting to get overgrown in the tree. This pulley appeared to help get the cable up high in the air.

Further uphill was the attachment point, the cable running around the base of a bristlecone. It's been there so long the cable is part of the tree now. I feel a little bad for the tree.

We got back in the truck and headed up higher.

Our next stop was to look at the Nevada Climate-Ecohydrological Assesment Network (NevCAN) weather station. This is a network that goes across the Snake Range and up one side of the Sheep Range in Nevada. You can look at real-time data and photos from the cameras at the link above.

The views kept getting better and better as we ascended. Finally we reached the end of the road and had to travel the last part of the way up to the summit of Mount Washington on foot. It was good going on foot, we had time to absorb the beauty around us.

These dainty Erigeron looked bright and cheerful with their yellow and white coloring.

A knob of wind-eroded wood made me consider the bristlecones that used to grow at this elevation, which is now above treelike.

The Colorado Columbine (Aquilegia caerulea) made a striking appearance.

I wasn't the only one being held captive by the diminutive but colorful flowers!

Soon we could see north towards Wheeler Peak. It's so interesting how the colors change. Wheeler , Jeff Davis, and Baker Peaks are all made of metamorphic rock, the Prospect Mountain Quartzite. Closer we start getting into granites, and then closest, with the grey rock is limestone.

We had to pause for a few photos.

Aileen's first visit to the summit of Mt. Washington.

Looking northeast towards Steve, with a view of the Snake Creek drainage and Eagle Peak behind him (another limestone area with bristlecones).

Looking west towards me, with Spring Valley and the Schell Range in the background.

The view to the east takes in the North Fork Big Wash. The day was a bit hazy, so we couldn't see Snake Valley or the next mountain ranges very well.

Then it was time to head down the mountain.

We paused to check out some trees that had burned during the 1999 fire. The fire had burned up into bristlecones. We're not certain what the effect might be to the bristlecone community, but the fire certainly has opened up a lot of habitat to bighorn sheep, which are being tracked periodically with collars.

The afternoon light was magical, and I couldn't help but take a few more photos.

I noticed a younger bristlecone tree. Here's the next generation!

This striking three-foot tall plant with four-petaled green flowers is green gentian or elkweed (Frasera speciosa).

In contrast, here's the tiny dwarf alpine paintbrush (Castilleja nana), with a bee pollinating it. Note the orange pollen on the hind legs of the bee. This has been a busy bee!

The stunning sego lily (Calachortus nuttalli) with a pollinator. 

It's a long drive back down the mountain, but with great views along the way.

It's worth the trip!