Great Basin Nat'l Park (the hikes)

For my four days off I headed to Great Basin National Park with one of my housemates, Eric. There are a bunch of pictures I want to put up, so they're going to come in themed batches.

These pictures are from the hikes we did:

The first full day there we hiked up to Wheeler Peak, which reaches just over 13,000 feet, making it the second tallest point in Nevada. In this picture you can see part of the ridge we hiked up on the right side, leading to Wheeler (the peak on the right):


This is a photo looking down the mountain somewhere along the way up. The lake on the left side was about a quarter of the way into the hike.


Me rushing into a picture from the top of Wheeler:


Eric and I at the top:


Snow along a ridge at the top. It was in the 40's up there, it was great.



The next day we went for a hike that took us through a grove of bristlecone pines and ended at the one and only glacier of Nevada.

Bristlecone pines are supposedly the oldest living organisms in the world, some living up to nearly five thousand years old. They are extremely adaptable to their environment and grow very slowly, but live forever.



They have beautiful needles, short and tightly packed into bundles of five:




Not only do they LIVE for a long time, but once they die their remains can take over two thousand years to decay, resulting in gnarly remains like this:


A cone:



Once we worked our way through the grove, we hit the glacier, which is essentially snow that does not melt. So here it is, with Wheeler Peak above on the right:




Looking away from the glacier into the till created over the years: