I was returning to camp after a ride on BLM roads that was only half-interesting. Maybe that is why I gave the benefit of the doubt to one last possibility. The scenery didn't appear interesting. And this last road might have a puddle or two.
At least the road had a nice uphill slope and a hard pack surface. The road went between two parallel ridges about 500 feet high. Except the east side was more like a series of small volcanos.
The road kept up with this uniform climb. I thought that the vegetation was becoming taller each mile, but perhaps I was just imagining that.
Would there soon be an isolated copse of aspen trees? There is something wonderful about frail aspens just barely surviving in the midst of all that sagebrush. They huddle together, holding on to life by their fingernails.
There were no up-and-downs the entire way. Only a uniform, second-gear uphill. In all my years of dirt road mountain biking, I have never had this happen before!
Now I could put my cute little dog in her milk crate and let her ride back down the smooth downslope. Wonderful.
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The uniformity of this road reminded me of a dry wash. Perhaps it used to be a slow creek during some past era. I got interested in the last Ice Age in the western states. It wasn't too hard to search for it, on the internet.
Where I was, in southeastern Idaho, was the northern limit of Lake Bonneville, once as big as Lake Michigan is today. (The Great Salt Lake is all that is left of it.)
Learning about the last Ice Age in the western states, and trying to visualize it, is a great mental game when sightseeing in the West.
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In a single stand, each tree is a genetic replicate of the other, hence the name a “clone” of aspens used to describe a stand.
Older than the massive Sequoias or the biblical Bristlecone Pines, the oldest known aspen clone has lived more than 80,000 years on Utah’s Fishlake National Forest.
Any plant is frail at the boundary of its domain, or its domain would expand.