Scaling Lone Tree

It’s said that we sometimes fail to see the forest for the trees, but that is not a problem out here in the western Great Basin Desert. In moist slot canyons or riparian areas you’ll find aspen, cottonwood, mountain mahogany, and even ponderosa, Jeffrey, and sugar pine, but the open country is sagebrush steppe, largely treeless high desert where the “forest” consists only of widely dispersed Utah junipers. It is hard for most of us to conceive of a forest in which individual trees may be hundreds or even thousands of yards from each other, due to the lack of water. Our trees are like distant electrons within the vast, burning nucleus of the desert, for this is a forest consisting mainly of space.

“Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite,” wrote Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire. “If a man knew enough he could write a whole book about the juniper tree. Not juniper trees in general but that one particular juniper tree.” In the high, open valley west of our home, which is all public land, there is one such particular juniper tree. It is not a very big tree, a young juniper, perhaps only a century old. Most remarkable about this tree is its isolation: it stands alone on the floor of this expansive, windswept basin. From any hill or mountain ridge in the valley you can look down and see, in some cases from vast distances, this single juniper, standing solitary, a tiny island of green in a sea of shimmering sage. In managing to survive alone out on these desiccated sage flats, Lone Tree has earned legacy status.

The proper way to stalk a tree is to begin from a great distance, uphill and downwind, and then sneak up on it very slowly. I begin my approach to Lone Tree by climbing what I call Moonrise, Palisades, and then Prospect, the three unnamed ridges, each higher than the last, that rise westward into the azure sky above the wild hill where we’ve made our home. From the crest of Prospect I gaze due west across the sweeping valley to our imposing home mountain, which rises high above it. At this distance, Lone Tree is visible only to the eyes of one who already knows where it stands. Because the tree is more than a mile away and a thousand feet below, it is a mere pixel, indistinguishable from other dots on the landscape, most of which are jumbles of shattered granite boulders.

After descending the western slope of Prospect through a steep canyon, a half hour of scrambling brings Lone Tree close enough that, while still impressively distant, it is now discernible as a tree rather than a heap of boulders. I am still a half mile from the juniper and 500 or so feet above it, and fortunately it has not yet noticed me. This is an important distance from which to admire Lone Tree, because if you happened to be perishing of exposure, that tiny mushroom out on the barren sage flats would represent your only possibility of refuge from the relentless desert sun. It is impossible to see this green magnet from here in summer and not fantasize about reclining in its cooling shade.

Another thirty minutes of billy-goating down a slope that is, by turns, scree and sand brings me to the valley floor. I am now a quarter mile from Lone Tree, and am better able to sneak through the sage, prowling low like a mountain lion. From this proximity, a distinct color palette emerges: the sidereal blue of the western sky is brushed with the diaphanous white of
attenuated clouds, while the mountain below it is sere brown and corrugated, here and there shadowed by rock fields on north-facing slopes. Because I now have an eye-line shot of the tree, I notice how beautifully it is set against the double-knolled hill behind it. That mounded rise is topped with boulders that, apparently, host enough chartreuse lichen to provide a hint of a yellow-green that is mirrored in a few ephedra bushes in the foreground, scattered among the dust-colored sage. From this angle and distance, Lone Tree is irresistible. It pulls me forward, as I zigzag stealthily through the sage maze toward its welcoming shade.

Once I am within a hundred yards of the tree, what appeared to be lichen on the rocky hills behind it emerge, instead, as ephedra and small bunch grasses growing in open patches in the hill’s broken granite tops. At this distance, the shapes of the image strike me as even more important than its colors. This perspective reveals how gracefully the domed arch of the juniper’s crown is repeated in the arched tops of the granite hills behind it, which are themselves reflected in the sinuous bulges in the ridgeline of the big mountain that crowds the western sky. I can see, for the first time, that the tree has a full crown yet a skeletal, open structure beneath. I am struck by how this form is mirrored in the brushy tops and dark stems of the big sage that fill the valley. This top-heavy shape shows that Lone Tree has been cropped around its base, probably by winter range mule deer when it was a sapling.

From thirty feet away, Lone Tree fills the frame of my view, crowding out the landscape and demanding my full attention. Beauregard, my pooch, has trotted ahead and is already reclined comfortably beneath it. At this distance, I notice hopeful second growth spouting from the long-ago cropped trunk. The area beneath and surrounding the tree is clear of sage, suggesting that this juniper beacon provides shelter for open range livestock, for Old Man Coyote, and other wild things, including a wayward desert rat and his old dog.

Noticing several dark masses hidden within its crown, I make my final advance on this particular juniper. Now standing beneath Lone Tree and gazing up inside it, I see cradled in its angular, scaled arms a large, intricately woven stick nest about eight feet off the ground. I do not know who lives in this nest, but I do know why: if you fancy an arboreal home, this is the only game in town. The nest leads me to the realization that this tree has accomplished something remarkable. It is growing in an exposed and unfavorable spot and has, at some point, been thoroughly munched. It has allowed many of its limbs to die in a successful attempt to preserve its core vitality. Miraculously, it has even dodged the wildfires that scour this high-elevation desert basin every fifteen or twenty years. Working entirely alone, this single, gnarled juniper has kept my scorching, windswept home valley from being treeless. I would be fortunate to achieve so much in my own life.

I spent a pleasant half hour with Beau, both of us stretched out in the sage-scented alkali dust beneath Lone Tree. Only when we finally rose and shook ourselves off did I suddenly notice the other tree. I had visited this solitary tree only to discover that it was not alone after all. Just north of this particular juniper was its shadow tree, a delicate, filigreed net of shade cast down for the benefit of every creature in the valley. It is this single juniper’s cooling shadow that makes it possible to traverse the valley floor during midday in summer. Creatures stop at Lone Tree because it is all that can be put between ourselves and the sun. Beneath it you will find great horned owl pellets and wild mustang dung, the coffee-bean droppings of pronghorn, taper-tipped coyote scat containing fragments of kangaroo rat skulls, tufts of matted jackrabbit fur, the gracefully curved alabaster rib bone of a calf, a pair of ragged raven feathers, an old beer can pull tab carried in from afar by an enterprising packrat.

Our way of seeing the world is conditioned not only by experience and belief, but also by scale: by the distance, angle, and perspective from which we approach and view things. I find it useful to back up from something I am concentrating on—a problem, a memory, a story—until I am so far away from and so high above it that it exists in that liminal zone between the visceral world of granite and the equally beautiful universe of the imagination. I also find it helpful to begin from far away and high above something I wish to explore—an idea, a way of understanding the desert, a lone juniper—and stalk it through registers of scale, until it becomes solitary, focused, all-consuming. Perhaps the true nature of a desert is veiled by its sage-filled valley, and the nature of its valley is hidden within the arms of its solitary juniper tree, and the nature of that unique tree is concealed within its woven nest, and the nature of that singular nest is a latticed pattern so exquisitely complex, imbricated, and artful that one must begin from a distant ridgetop in order to see it clearly.

All photos courtesy of Michael P. Branch.

An earlier version of this essay appeared as a chapter in Mike’s book How to Cuss in Western:
And Other Missives from the High Desert (Roost Books, 2018).