I Visited The Oldest Trees In The World

this week i go on an adventure i'm headed into nevada to visit some ghost towns and on the way back i'm gonna hit the oldest living trees in the world at the bristlecone forest so let's take a field trip [Music] so my goal in this week's video is just to show you guys a little bit more of the surrounding area cerro gorda you know i got to go down and do a supply run i figured i'd make an adventure out of it and i've wanted to go to the bristlecone forest for a really long time it's a place that has the oldest living trees in the world these trees are something like 5 000 years old and when i was looking at the map i realized it was not too far from nevada and there's two ghost towns out in nevada that i've been wanting to get back to too one's called gold point and it's owned by a guy named walt and waltz owned gold point for about 40 years i met him about six months ago and he told me stories about what it's like living in a ghost town and i think these days after being at cerro gordo for a year those stories rang a little bit more true the walt's a hard guy to get a hold of you know i've been emailing him and calling him with no response so he told me last time to always just show up so that's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna show up hopefully walt's there can pass on some advice to me and when i was looking at the map i realized that just beyond gold point was a place called gold field and i remember hearing about goldfield because one day i was down a wyatt earp rabbit hole you know of tombstone fame i read that wyatt and virgil erp lived in goldfield and they lived there in around 1905 and at that point in time goldfield was the largest town in nevada and it kind of hosted the who's who of mining history and so since i'm gonna be not too far from that makes no sense to turn around there so my plan started just bristle cone but now we're gonna head into nevada [Music] the gold point was established in the 1860s in a similar era to cerro gordo and originally it was called lime point until they found a big deposit of gold here hence the name gold point and then during world war ii in the 1940s when the government shut down all non-essential mines including gold mines gold point was shut down and then in the 1970s two friends came to town and started buying up lots and the story goes that one of these friends won the mega jackpot in las vegas i was able to come back here and buy up a lot of the property i love ghost towns you know that might go without saying considering i've been living in one for almost a year but i think i'm reminded of that love every time i walk into a different mining town you know each time i see that golden brown wood aged from 100 years in the sun because each of these towns has its own history and its own future my grandfather used to watch the show gunsmoke over and over you know he saw every episode at least a dozen times i think 20 years later i can probably quote half the episodes myself you know and then i remember my imagination just coming to life watching that show thinking of what those towns must have been actually like you know the people that actually lived there and so maybe for me you know chasing these ghost towns is chasing nostalgia but i just know no matter what the reason every time i go to one of these new towns i get excited because you know you find purpose and meaning in keeping these places alive from keeping them from turning in dust and sometimes in between you have this town that's half dead and half alive you know it shows the green sprouts of life but also the cracked limbs of death and in that way it's very similar to the bristlecone pine and i think that's what makes all of them beautiful is you kind of can experience the history and the future in one glimpse well how about that so walt's out of town he broke a tooth but lee saw me opened up the bar allowed me to get a course i guess sit here and take in gold point [Music] that's pretty nice of them you know just tell me that you know not too many of these types of towns left so i appreciate them taking the time and opening it up so let me continue on to a different ghost town called gold field the largest city in nevada once upon a time and it was home to people like wyatt and virgil erp and all sorts of famous people [Music] [Applause] all right i'm just entering goldfield so goldfield was established in 1902 and then two years later by 1904 it was the largest city in nevada something like 30 000 people lived here then and it attracted the attention of the earps so wyatt and virgil erp moved over here of tombstone fame and by the next year virgil was the sheriff of goldfield bad luck hit had some floods and some fires and these days goldfield has a population of about 200. there's still a lot to see here i'm gonna stop in my first stop is gonna be this goldfield hotel which i've heard is the most haunted thing in nevada so let's see what that's all about the world famous goldfield hotel this place was built in 1908 and eventually owned by a guy named george wingfield who is a legend in the mining community he was worth over 30 million by the time he was 30 back in those days but the story goes that one day when he was here a mistress of his came and confronted him about his illegitimate child and in response he chained her into the room waited for the baby to be born and when the baby was born it was thrown in a mine shaft underneath the hotel and then she was killed i think it was room 9a so to many people this is the most haunted building in nevada to others that's just part of a legend and lore well apparently one of the things to see now in uh gold field is the international car forest there's a bunch of cars that are put in the ground you know sometimes it's beautiful just to see all the things in their surrounding area you'd always have to go far to find cool stuff so let's take a look around this car [Applause] [Music] forest [Music] [Music] [Music] well since we're playing taurus let's see what's going on with all these old stone buildings over here the stone wall it says palmetto thinking that joshua trees were related to palm trees the 1866 prospectors named the mining camp palmetto so this i guess used to be a big mine as well [Music] it's cool how it's still established like this oh yeah clean that thing that must have been for uh kiln or some type of chimney look at that such a cool building over there it's beautiful and that's it leaving nevada headed back [Applause] [Music] to the home turf on my way back to saragorro i really wanted to visit the bristlecone pine forest it's this patch of dirt up in the white mountains above big pine that's home to the oldest living thing on earth there's trees there that are close to 5 000 years old and i just feel really fortunate to have all these things in my backyard i mean this area has all sorts of nature superlatives you know we have the highest peak the lowest point the hottest desert and the oldest trees you know cerro gordo is what brought me to this area and the more time i spend here the more i fall in love with not just the town but the surrounding area as well oh boy here we are the oldest trees in the world well folks i am almost there but as you can see there's some snow and giving that i have a lit my little two-wheel drive baby tacoma i'm hiking the rest of the way in i have no problem that would get down this without issue but it's coming back up especially if it starts icing over a little bit i just don't feel like getting stuck on today but we're getting in there there's your phone [Music] i just slipped and fell so i guess it was iced over given the fact that i just oh that's a little scary so we walk up here [Music] all right so supposedly backyaraways will be the discovery cove and that is where the oldest tree is and they don't actually define which of the trees is the oldest in that little cove because they don't go to vandalize it try to take pieces of it so all you'll know is the area of which it is but you know some of these trees can get up to 4 800 years old and their needles alone can stay on the tree for up to 40 years so these needles on these trees are older than i am and these trees are older than just everything it looks like my hike into the grove is going to be pretty snowy [Music] so i've gone from the desert of nevada to the snowy forest of bristlecones all in one day [Music] to me bristle cones are my idol you know they're kind of the anti-startup that take forever to grow to survive in places that other people couldn't survive and they're all about longevity not speed i relate to that being up at cerro gordo living in places that other people maybe can't live and focused on longevity over speed it's very humbling standing by these and thinking about what the world's gone through since they've been here bristlecone pines are beautiful you know they're majestic they're that beauty that takes time to create you know the beauty that comes from character and contrast within the tree you know you need the twists and scrapes and fading to provide that contrast i think it's much like the ghost towns you know where you go and you see the character and the story that went into them and that's why anything old and developed over time holds a different type of beauty and that type of deep beauty formed through centuries is humbling you know it's a reminder of the scale of time and how old the earth is around us and i think it helps put certain things in perspective you know even today when i was walking up to the bristlecone forest i was so stressed about something related to the town you know something that's been distracting me these past few weeks and taking up way too much of my time and my mind was just consumed with the issue you know thinking about how unfair it was and playing out a million different scenarios in response and i literally slipped on the ice and looked up and saw one of the bristle cones and it immediately snapped me out of it you know these trees are 5 000 years old imagine how many true catastrophes happened in the world during their lifespans you know it's it's uncountable and so will my problem matter in 5 000 years definitely not you know won't matter in five years or five days even you know i don't think so and seeing that tree was a reminder of that for me you know these are 5 000 year old trees growing on mountains that are millions of years old you know it's insane it's it's too much to comprehend and i think we need that sometimes something so much bigger than us then we can't comprehend it it shrinks our problems back down to their appropriate size and to me the quickest way to get that perspective is to get out into nature you know that's why i make it a point to take these types of trips they aren't distracting from my work you know they are part of my work because with the proper perspective everything gets done better so i just hope that we all can continue finding ways to get out there and put our issues in perspective and remember that we're just a blip on the earth's timeline and to not spend that blip stressing over things that don't really matter [Music] you

Channel: Ghost Town Living

Views: 398,913

Keywords: abandoned ghost town, brent underwood, cerro gordo, cerro gordo ghost town, ghost town, ghost town living, living in a ghost town, oldest tree in the world

Id: IJWPqit6hao

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2021