45 Days on a Gen3 Hayabusa - 2023 Pashnit Touring

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You can reach the OVRO 4-miles north of Highway 168 at Orvo Rd 2.2 miles east of Big Pine. The radar dishes are used to make discoveries about star-forming regions, proto-stellar disks, proto-planetary disks and galactic structure. Galactic structure. It has a nice ring to it. The first 32-foot dish arrived to this valley in 1958 and by 1959 another was added listening to echoes in outer space. By 1968, a 130-foot dish was added. Radar dishes pointed towards the heavens are often paired up with other dishes in other parts of the globe all listening to the same radio frequencies.

 

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I first visited on my Gen2 and very cool to be back here.

 

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How it all works, I have no idea. But listening to radio signals from the cosmos just sounds interesting.

Is it open to the public? Probably not, but we're in and out in a matter of minutes, we didn't see a soul, and nobody ever messes with a big group of bikers.

 

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Sierra Range in the distance. The small town down there in the valley at the base of the range is Big Pine.

This mountain range to the east of the OVRO, that's the White Mountain Range, the oldest trees in the world are at the top.

Heading up to 10,000 ft.

White Mountain Rd is a twisty ride to the top

 

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White Mountain Road is the reason why we came all this way and it doesn’t disappoint setting out from the 7200 ft mark and gaining 3000 feet in 12 miles. White Mountain Rd is straight at first before wiggling into a canyon and curving northward with the first double 180-degree hairpin 2.5 miles in. Yes, double means a full 180 degrees then flipping back the other direction 180 degrees. Great fun! Road surface is fair to decent with a broken yellow. Elevation begins to climb through another set of double hairpins and then another four sets of hairpins. You can see the road ahead climbing the mountain.

This view of the road ahead is enticing, alluring and spurs you ever onward.

 

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You can look back to where we came from at middle top

Level with nearby Sierra Mountain Range. We're back at 9300 ft at Sierra Viewpoint.

 

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Still climbing

 

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Reason why we came up (beside the super-twisty road). Oldest trees on the planet are on this mountaintop.

How's 4000+ years grab ya?!

Passing through the 10,000 ft mark, one of the highest paved roads in the state (there are just two in California over 10,000).

That view!

 

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Parking lot is 10,000 feet. Try to take a deep breath. You can't.

Bristlecone pine trees are the oldest trees on the planet.

 

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The visitor center at Schulman Grove is brand new. In September 2008, a few years after my first visit, the visitor center burned to the ground in a deliberate fire set by an arsonist. Fire crews raced 24 miles to the mountain top from Big Pine but by the time fire crews arrived, the log cabin building had completely burned down. Plans to rebuild the visitor center began the very next day.

The resultant present-day visitor center is a delight with open beam construction inside, and wide-open decks for picnics outside, plus there are numerous interesting displays within and always attended by talkative rangers who will eagerly explain the nearby trees.

Inside the visitor center, one of the most interesting displays is a long timeline placed up on the wall to attempt to give you a sense of what events have transpired over the last several thousand years over the life of these trees.

 

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Another nearby display shows a closeup of a whitebark pine cross section with respective dates labeled. You’ll often see these in redwood forests at Big Basin State Park and Muir Woods. Those coast redwood cross sections are often huge, 6 to 7 feet across. However, the physical size of a bristlecone pine cross section on display at the visitor center that sprouted in the year 432 while the Romans were battling one another in Italy is quite small in comparison denoting how slowly these trees grow

 

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After the death of Prometheus, the oldest known living tree was a 4,847 year old bristlecone pine found in the White Mountains.

It wasn't until 2012 when another bristlecone from the same area proved to be 5,065 years old.

Counting tree rings with a microscope. At bottom left are cores pulled form the trees which is how they figure out how old these trees are.

 

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Along the trail, you can often see the original soil line on the base of the trees. More interesting is the level of soil has dropped as much as 3 feet around some trees as erosion over the course of several thousand years has slowly exposed the tree roots.

A nearby toppled tree was dated to 3200 years old, but once the core samples were compared to other nearby living trees, it was discovered the tree died in 1676 and is still resting in the same exact place over 340 years later. These trees grow so slowly, a core sample pulled from the trunks may contain 100 years of growth in one inch of tree rings.

While other types of pine trees replace and regrow their needles every 4 to 6 years, Great Basin Bristlecone Pines keep their same needles for nearly 40 years. The wood is pest resistant in the form of a dense, resinous wood that resists attacks from mold, fungus and pine-killing bark beetles. Bristlecone Pines can lose 90% of their bark and still continue to live with only a narrow strip of bark remaining. Many of the trees you see up here have no bark exposing a twisted and gnarled appearance, often with a circular twist to the core of the tree. Many of the trees are shaped by the winds atop this mountain. The poor alkaline soil also allows the trees to grow competition free of other tree species and the low undergrowth prevents any fuel for wildfires providing a natural firebreak.

 

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Bristlecone Pine Forest is one of my favorite places. Something about this place is just cool thinking about the timeline of these trees.

The road behind us (below) is dirt. It leads up to another grove of Bristlecone Pines. White Mountain Rd continues north another 13 miles as a dirt road along the spine of the range to a locked gate near Barcroft Research Station.

This research station was built at an elevation of 12,470 ft in the early 1950s and can house up to 20 scientists in a 40'x100’ Quonset hut. The station has been the site of continued research in the physiological effects of high elevation in addition to the study of cosmic background radiation. The buildings are off-grid and all supported through rooftop solar panels. An additional research station at Crooked Creek is also along White Mountain Rd 10 miles beyond Schulman Grove (where we parked & checked out the visitor center). A second grove of ancient bristlecone trees is located at Patriarch Grove along the dirt portion of White Mountain Rd.

A few more miles north of Barcroft Research Station on 14246 ft White Mountain, a stone hut was built atop the peak in 1955. The White Mountain Range bumps over the Nevada state line at Boundary Peak. You can ride as far as the locked gate near the Barcroft Research Station. There is a dirt parking area for hikers to base from for the hike to nearby White Mountain. The gate at the end of White Mountain Rd is opened once a year for Open Gate Day. Autos can drive to Barcroft Research Center which gets you 4-miles closer to White Mountain. White Mountain Peak is said to be the easiest hike of area fourteeners, peaks over 14,000 feet.

This graded jeep trail is also popular with high-altitude mountain bikers. White Mountain Peak is the third tallest peak in California, but only receives on average 13 feet of snow each winter. In comparison, the Sierra Nevada Range which is so close, you feel you can reach out and touch it across the Owens Valley can get triple that at 60+ feet. The Owens Valley beneath the peak is 10,000 vertical feet below making it one of the deepest valleys in North America.

The extreme differences between these two parallel mountain ranges in the lack of moisture in the White Mountains produces a desert like climate of extreme dryness atop these peaks. Moisture in the air is scant, although this very dry air produces perfect conditions for stargazers who drive up to photograph the Milky Way. In addition to the dryness, high winds are also a calling card of the White Mountain range with the summit on nearby White Mountain Peak recording wind gusts at 162 mph in 2008. While summer temps can be a mild 65 degrees, low temps have reached -26 degrees during winters.

 

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Starting our descent of several thousand feet to the Owens Valley in the distance.

 

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Mike asked me if I wanted to ride the supercharged H2. He didn't have to ask twice.

Mike gets to ride the Gen3. Not a bad trade I think.

Back through the narrow single lane Westgard Pass on Highway 168.

 

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We hit a long straight at the base of the range and I gassed the supercharged H2. It took off like a rocket and I held on for dear life.

"This is not normal!" I said outloud in the helmet. Within seconds I was doing 120 and tucked in to the zero fairing naked bike.

Giggles. Then more giggles. What a fun bike.

Copper Top in Big Pine