Near the top of Wheeler Peak, at the cold ragged line where the last trees give out, grows a stand of pines that are, by a fair reckoning, the oldest living things on earth. Great Basin bristlecones are not what you picture when you picture an ancient tree. They rarely stand taller than a house, and most of what you see is silvered deadwood, the living tree narrowed to a single twisting ribbon of bark feeding a few green branches. But in 1964 a graduate student cut one down here — for research, with permission, not knowing what it was — and counted more than 4,862 rings in the stump. It had very likely been alive since before the first pyramid was built. Its name was Prometheus, and it is the reason, as much as any, that this mountain and its groves were made into Great Basin National Park.
An archipelago pretending to be a wasteland
Look at Nevada on a relief map and it reads like a fleet at anchor: range after range of mountains running north and south, more than three hundred of them, separated by long flat basins of sagebrush. This is the Basin and Range, and its logic is simple and strange. Climb any tall range and the desert drops away beneath you — sagebrush gives way to piñon, then aspen, then fir, then bare rock and snowbanks that last into July. Each high summit is a cold, wet island stranded in a hot dry sea, and the plants and animals that live up there cannot cross the desert to reach the next one. Biologists call them sky islands. It is the truest way to see Nevada: not an empty state but an archipelago, its life pooled on separate peaks like water in the bottom of so many bowls.
The oldest island
The bristlecone groves ride the flank of Wheeler Peak, which at over thirteen thousand feet is the second-highest mountain in the state and one of the coldest, loneliest places in it. The trees grow on the rubble of a vanished glacier, and a patch of permanent ice still hides beneath the peak's north face — about as close to a living glacier as Nevada gets. Below ground the same mountain holds the marble chambers of Lehman Caves; above it arch some of the darkest night skies left in the Lower 48. The park is among the least-visited in the whole system, which is exactly its gift: you can stand in a five-thousand-year-old grove, in silence, and feel the weight of that much time press down on you.
Nevada's Alps
A few hours north, Lamoille Canyon and the Ruby Mountains rise out of the Elko County range country in a way nothing else in the state does. Real glaciers carved the Rubies, and they left behind the one landscape here that earns the comparison the locals make — a U-shaped canyon of granite walls and hanging valleys and cold blue lakes that people fairly call Nevada's Alps, or the Yosemite of Nevada. The range is high enough and wet enough to hold things found nowhere else nearby, including, of all creatures, the Himalayan snowcock. Wildlife managers released that Central Asian game bird here in the 1960s and '70s, and it took hold in these mountains and nowhere else in North America — because only the Rubies are enough like the roof of the world to suit it. A bird from the Himalaya, marooned on a Nevada island.
The island made of water
At the foot of the Rubies the miracle inverts. More than a hundred and sixty springs seep out of the base of the range and gather, at the low point of Ruby Valley, into a vast marsh — the heart of Ruby Lake National Wildlife Refuge, a remnant of a great Ice Age lake called Franklin that dried away when the climate warmed. It is one of the most remote refuges in the Lower 48, reachable only by miles of gravel, and yet it holds the densest population of nesting canvasback ducks anywhere west of the Mississippi, and sits at a crossroads where the Pacific and Central flyways overlap. In the driest state in the Union, it is an island of open water, and twice a year the sky above it fills with birds that have crossed a continent to find it.
The island made of sand
Some islands are stranger and smaller than a mountain. Twenty miles east of Fallon, right on the shoulder of U.S. 50, a single dune six hundred feet high rises straight out of flat desert — Sand Mountain, built grain by grain from the beaches of Lake Lahontan, the inland sea that drowned western Nevada in the Ice Age and then vanished. When the wind is right and the sand slides just so, the whole mountain hums a low, carrying note; it is one of only a handful of "singing" dunes on earth. The Northern Paiute heard that sound long before the geologists explained it, and named the dune for a great rattlesnake traveling northeast with the wind at its back. And in the buckwheat at its base lives the Sand Mountain blue, a small pale butterfly that exists on this one dune and nowhere else in the world — an entire species marooned on an island of sand.
Pull off the highway
You can drive clear across Nevada and see none of it. The interstates and the loneliest road run through the basins, where the country really is as blank as its reputation, and the mountains stay a blue-gray backdrop you never enter. But every one of those ranges is a lamp lit with something the desert around it cannot keep. Even the Mojave, far to the south, throws up its own cold island: the limestone crown of Mount Charleston, nearly twelve thousand feet of alpine forest above the heat, its gray summit built from the floor of a vanished tropical sea — the strangest geologic story in the state. The oldest tree on earth, a bird from the Himalaya, a marsh full of ducks, a butterfly on a singing dune. Nevada keeps its treasures the way the sea keeps islands: scattered, hard to reach, and worth the crossing.