Silver Canyon to the Bristlecones

There are two ways up to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. One is paved, gentle, and takes an hour from Big Pine. The other starts at a cattle guard outside Laws and climbs more than six thousand feet in ten miles.

Both end at the same trees. Only one of them is a drive you will remember.

What the road is

Silver Canyon Road — Forest Road 6S02 — leaves US-6 at Laws, a few miles north of Bishop, and climbs the west face of the White Mountains until it meets White Mountain Road at around 10,400 feet. From there it is a straightforward run south to Schulman Grove and the bristlecones.

The numbers do the explaining. Roughly 4,200 feet at the bottom, roughly 10,400 at the top, ten miles in between. That is a sustained grade steep enough that cyclists use it as a benchmark for suffering.

The road splits into two distinct halves:

• The lower six miles run up the canyon bottom and cross the creek around seven times. In normal late-season flow these are slow, shallow and unremarkable in a four-wheel drive. After a storm or during heavy runoff they are a different conversation.
• The upper four miles are the switchbacks. One lane, steep, cut into the face, with the valley opening up behind you. This is the part people come for.

Driving it

Uphill traffic has the right of way, and on a one-lane shelf that is not a courtesy, it is the only workable rule. Someone reversing downhill into a pullout is doing the safe thing; someone reversing uphill around a blind switchback is not.

Use low range on the descent. Riding the brakes down four miles of that grade will cook them, and brake fade on a one-lane shelf road is about as bad as it gets. The engine should be doing the work and you should be able to hear it.

If you can arrange it, the best version of this run is up Silver Canyon and down CA-168 — climb the hard side, spend the day at the groves, and take the pavement home. Your brakes will thank you and you will have seen both faces of the range.

Leave the trailer

This is the one that matters if you tow. There is nowhere to turn a trailer around in the upper section and nowhere to pass. Drop it at camp in the valley and go up unloaded. The Jeep is a great deal happier without it on that grade anyway.

When to go

The road closes for winter and is unmaintained when it is. The practical window is high summer into autumn, once the creek has dropped and before the first real snow.

Avoid it wet. The grade that is merely steep when dry becomes a serious problem with water on it, and there is no shoulder to make a mistake on.

Up top, remember the groves are day use only and closed between 10pm and 6am. Camp lower — back down in the Owens Valley, or on the lower stretches of White Mountain Road where it is permitted — and come up in the morning.

What is actually up there

Great Basin bristlecone pines, some of them approaching five thousand years old. They are the oldest known non-clonal living things on the planet, and they survive by growing in the worst ground available: thin dolomite soil, ferocious wind, almost no water, a growing season measured in weeks.

They look dead. Half of any given tree usually is. Then you find the one strip of living bark feeding one living branch, and it has been doing that since before the pyramids.

Worth six thousand feet.