The Creosote has always been one of my favorite plants. It’s not particularly anything, except boring. It’s scraggly at best and it has a musty smell after a rain. I like it because it is so common. When I read that a particular creosote plant was quite possibly one of the oldest continuously living plants on planet earth, it did not surprise me. I noted the area and on a trip to Cerro Gordo in the Owens Valley, I decided to search out the King Clone. I loaded up my wife’s Outback and we drove to the area, vectoring in on the GPS on my phone.
The experience was nothing less than amazing for me.
The original creosotes believed to have colonized this part of the Mojave originated from the Lower Colorado region when the last glaciers retreated at the end of the Pleistocene nearly 12,000 years ago. It is speculated that their ancestors migrated northward from South America. In Gathering the Desert, author Gary Nabhan states that Tohono O’odham (Papago) creation legend asserts that greasewood was the first life form arising out of the mound of earth that Earth Maker had shaped when life began. From the branches of this plant, the first animal originated, a tiny scale insect (Tachardiella larreae) that produces a lac or resin which hardened to become the crust of the earth.
It is written that the estimated age of the King Clone is 11,700 years.
King Clone Creosote, however, is another story. The King was identified and estimated to be 11,700 years old by Frank Vasek, a professor at the University of California, Riverside. The seemingly ‘individual’ bushes that make up the King’s ring are direct offshoots, or clones of a single plant
The field botanist have radio carbon dated the King Clone to this age. Others in the area have been dated to nearly this age as well.
On my visit, I knew I was in the right spot. The stake, solitary, driven into the desert next to the ring, in the middle of no where and the cluster looking exactly like the old pictures of it. And the solitary small sign, I was there. I touched nothing. I left only footprints and they will be gone quickly.
I did manage a few photographs with my phone which I am sharing with you.
No comments:
Post a Comment