Visiting “the Ancients”
posted in Roadside Attractions, Collecting Locations, Filming |Before driving back to Pasadena, we had to film a couple more locations on the Inyo County Video. So on the loop back around we had 3 more collecting sights planned out; Saturday, collecting quartz crystal and apahce tears outside of Big Pine, and Sunday, collecting Coyote Range Garnets with Cal Graeber.
Now I don’t know about you guys, but Justin is a MOTIVATED COLLECTOR when it’s for quartz points, especially ones that are double terminated or odd shaped floaters. Both of which are plentiful at this location.
We quickly filmed what we needed for the video, and then settled down to collect some quartz crystals.
After collecting quartz crystals we decided to take a side detour and visit the Ancient Bristlecone Pine forest in Inyo National Forest. The trees in this forest are some of the oldest living things in the entire world. Many of the trees are 4,000 years old. They only grow between 10,00 and 11,00 foot elevation. So we had to drive up some steep windy roads to get to the forest.
Once we got there, the trees were crazy, twisty, tall. They are very freaky, gnarled trees. I like to refer to desert trees like this as “Halloween Trees”.
Being that this place is a National Park, there was information about Ancient Bristlecone Pines.
It turns out that some of the PINE NEEDLES on a single tree can be up to 40 years old. This conserves energy, letting the tree live to be thousands of years old. The oldest living organism on the planet is a tree called “Methuselah”, that back in an unpublicized section of the park.
But I am all about the bristlecones, themselves.
They have pointy bristles on the end of each segment.
The animals in national parks are allways so tame.
On the way out we decided to stop and have lunch at one of the roadside picnic areas we had seen on the way into the park.
As evening fell we drove out toward the apache tear location. It was great… so great that we decided to just camp there for the evening.
The best thing about this location was that we had 4 bars of internet. I stayed up late and finished some website work, and Justin got up early to do his.
At 9 o’ clock in the morning we got a call from Cal about meeting us in Bishop to collect garnets, and we were ready to go.
We got in the truck, only to find out that it wouldn’t start. Turns out the battery was drained. Apparently this morning when Justin was checking his email, he forgot to turn the car on… draining the battery. We waited, and waited all day to see if the battery would revive, but it didn’t.
At least we had apache tears to collect. We got seven bags of them.
Eventually we called out for a service truck in Bishop to give us a jump. We walked 2 miles through the open range…
Down to the canal the to show them the way back to where we were.
We decided to stay the night in Bishop and meet up with Cal in the morning. So basically, we went to sleep. It had been a long day.