Pilgrimage to Pando

What looks like an ordinary grove of quaking aspen trees in the remote area of Fishlake Utah turns out to be the oldest and most massive living creatures on record: Pando, a single male tree with a gigantic root system spanning over 100 acres, continuously sprouting new trunks to replace dying ones. This has been his successful survival strategy for 80,000 years! Pando has survived glacial periods and adapted to geological changes.

A mere 9000 years ago, indigenous mammoth hunters made summer homes in the area and stalked the giant beasts that would have trapped through Pando. Pando has large eye-like growths on his trunk, common to quake and aspen trees, which give one an eerie feeling of being watched. If Pando could see, he would have seen the blazing of the Spanish trail, conquistador slavers, and the bloody battles of the Blackhawk war. He would have seen the migrations and extinctions of dozens of species, survived 80,000 bitter winters, risen from the ashes of countless forest fires, and slept under all the world's constellations three times due to the axial precession of earth.