And to ponder our relationship with the Earth. The dawn of a new millennium is no new experience for bristlecone pines, many of which are more than 5,000 years old. The Visitor Center is 23 miles outside Big Pine, Calif., and Patriarch Grove is 13 miles farther via dirt road. No place in the lower Forty-Eight invites such contemplation as the deep interior of the American West, the Great Basin Desert. Here, each of us stands above basin floors or on the ridges of bald mountains, tall among the stands of saltbush or greasewood or bunchgrass, piercing space and time, creating a scene, a drama.
Nothing gets in our way.
The Great Basin is a reservoir of dark night skies. Sleeping in canyons and mountain valleys you see a narrow strip of stars - the universe from the side. You look up. Again, the immensity of the desert landscape becomes intimate. You are the center of the universe.