Tom's National Park Adventure

I like learning new things. Here at Great Basin National Park I have had the opportunity to learn many new things. Some are historical facts, others are more practical in nature. One interesting thing I’ve learned has to do with the term “post hole” or the verb “post holing”. It turns out that when I was describing breaking through the snow while I was hiking, I was referring to post holing! Since the hole I was leaving in the snow resembles a post hole.

The other common sense thing I learned was to make sure to start your longest hike in the day as early as possible. Today when I started my hike it was 62 degrees. By the time I finished the hike, it was 95 degrees!

Today was my last day in the park. Tomorrow I start my journey home. I wanted to make my last hike a good one.

The hike I chose was the Post Canyon trail. The trail guide said it was a moderate hike, 6.6 miles in length and 1600 feet in elevation gain. So with that in mind I was at the trailhead at 7:00am.

This is a grove of young Aspen trees. If you were to take a DNA sample from any of these trees, it would all come back as the same tree! The trees are all part of a single organism. They are all connected through their root system.

Bristlecone Pine trees. If you look at them closely you can see that there is still some green on them even if they look like they are dead. The trees do a thing called “compartmentalization “. When some areas of the tree are dying or dead, the tree sends the available resources to the living parts of the tree. Could be that is why these trees can live up to 4000 years!

I’d love to be able to take this picture again in the fall. The Aspen trees which are so bright green in this picture would be golden in color in the fall and the contrasting colors would be gorgeous!

This is a view of the Pole Canyon at the bottom of the canyon. If you look at the notch in between the two mountains, that is where I crested my hike before heading down into the canyon.

During the Ranger program I went to last night, they talked about the “Glyphs” 0n some of the Aspen trees in the park. This area was used for different types of ranching over the years before it became a national park in 1986. Years ago the ranchers were raising sheep in the area. They brought in Shepards from South America to watch over the sheep. These shepherds who obviously had too much time on their hands started leaving their initials on the Aspen trees. They can be seen all over the park even though the injuries to the trees are well over 70 years old. After the area became a NP, they had a rash of new “Glyphs” show up on the trees! It turned out to be a graduate student who was distantly related to the original shepherds! He was a math major so he cut math equations into the trees! The picture I took looks to me like it was done in 1974.

Even though the hiking guide said it was a 6.6 mile hike, somehow I managed to walk just a bit longer! I love how my watch only gave me credit for climbing two flights of stairs even though the elevation gain was over 1600 feet!

I have enjoyed my time here. I enjoyed my time at all seven of the parks I visited while on this trip!

But all good things must come to an end at some point, so I will be leaving early in the morning. I will be heading to the Grand Junction, Co area. I have reservations at the Colorado River State Park .