Trespassing AS TOLD BY GARRET T GROVE
From Los Angeles, we’d driven through Las Vegas and onto the loneliest stretch of highway in America toward Ely, Nevada. It was meant to be a trip spent skiing and shooting photos in the bristlecone pine forest high in the peaks of Nevada’s Great Basin National Park. By the end of the eighth day, we would retreat sick, exhausted, empty-handed and a little spooked. Filmmaker Jordan Manley and I had come from sea level and figured we must have altitude sickness the first day. The town of Ely sits at over 6,000 feet, and after we’d hiked to the summit of Mount Washington at 11,658 feet to find the bristlecones, we both felt terrible. We thought it was a moment of recalibration—adjusting to the harsh climate where the trees thrive. We skied down and turned in for a rotten night’s sleep.
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The next day we were snowed out, and for our third day Carston Oliver joined us, fresh from a trip to India. Partway up that day’s 5,000-foot ascent, he was violently ill, puking and shitting nonstop (very likely a dose of cholera, which a partner on his trip had already been diagnosed with). Jordan and I continued on to the bristlecones and stood quietly for a few hours, staring at the trees. It was cold. Windy. Rime covered everything. The bristlecone pines in that area are 1,000 to 3,000 years old, and it’s eye-opening to think of all that has happened in their lifetimes. In just the last 150 years, they’ve patiently watched humans migrate into the valley below and start mining the very mountain they have sat upon for millennia. Within a few decades those mine shafts sat vacant, and
Above: Carston Oliver stands atop Mount Washington, Nevada, looking out on the ranches, wind farms and arid desert below. Right: Honored by Grove, Manley and Oliver as “the Old Friend,” this 8- to 10-foot bristlecone stands ragged without the protection of other trees nearby, most of its roots above ground.
