A Tour of Great Basin National Park's Bristlecone Groves, Part 6 - Snake Divide Grove

See Part 1 (Overview), Part 2 (Wheeler Cirque), Part 3 (Mt. Washington), Part 4 (Magic Grove), and Part 5 (Eagle Peak) of the Tour of Great Basin National Park's Bristlecone Pine Groves.

In this blog post, we're going to visit the Snake Divide Grove of bristlecone pines. On the map below, it's lumped in with the Mt. Washington grove. It's actually just east of the "n" in Mt. Washington as its own little grove. The bristlecones grow on white limestone (see photo above). They are accessed via a slight detour off the Snake Divide Trail, which stays in the forest to the north of the bare limestone knobs.

The trees are actually on two bare knobs, but they grow as regular forest giants in between. Even when the trees are tall and closer together, they are still amazing.

The wood is also exceptional. You can see this tree right from the Snake Divide trail (which starts at the end of the Snake Creek road).

The trees aren't super big, but they are twisted and tenacious.

Part of the fun of visiting the bristlecones is to see how odd they have become.

They are so good at clinging on to life, even when they fall over.

Prevailing winds can often be figured out just by looking at the trees.

This is one of the least visited bristlecone groves in the Park, mainly because most people don't know it exists. If you want to see the more popular Magic Grove, it's not too hard to add on a detour to the Snake Divide Grove to see some underappreciated but gorgeous trees.

 The last part in this series is coming soon!