The Bison Belly!!

Arrived two days ago, I really like it, thanks Charlie!
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DaveHS said:
Snow and wind are coming!
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Seeing that Great Basin quarter reminds me of the several times I went there. Very nice park with few people. A true dark sky location, one of my friends would bring his 12" mirror telescope and we would look at galaxies. Lehman Caves is spectacularly decorated, one time the ranger who took us through it said that he had worked at Carlsbad Caverns and liked Lehman more. On one visit we climbed Wheeler Peak, and on another we went to the bristlecone grove below Wheeler Peak. That is the grove where one of the greatest travesties in national forest history took place (not a national park at that time). In the 1960s there was a race to find the oldest tree, and a researcher from University of North Carolina found a good candidate in that grove. His coring tool broke, and instead of getting a new coring tool, he prevailed upon the forest service to allow him to cut it down. The ring count from the stump was 4,844 (later adjusted to 4,862), and because the center of the trunk had been abraded away by millennia of sand and ice blasting, they estimated that the tree was 4,950-5000 years old when it was cut down. This would make it older than the currently recognized oldest tree (Methuselah on White Mountain). They cut down the oldest tree on the planet to find out how old it was. The stump is in the upper part of the grove below Wheeler Peak, it was named the Prometheus tree.
 
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