And why shouldn’t Europeans love this place, the astonishing superlatives?  there’s nothing like this anywhere else on earth, the extremes of Mount Whitney, at 14,497 feet, the highest peak in California, an easy drive from Death Valley, which contains the lowest places in the U.S., which also registers the hottest temperatures.

You find the Bristlecones above 10,000 feet in the White Mountains along the eastern edge of the Owens Valley. These Bristlecone Pines were discovered and dated in the 1940s and ’50s by Dr. Schulman, a pioneer in the science of tree-ring counting, who went looking for the most ancient trees among the Giant Sequoias and found the surprisingly small and adaptive — an unkind person might say stunted –  specimens in several groves. Dr. Schulman died young, of a heart attack at age 49 in 1958. The grove we visited is named after him.

Towering clouds loomed over the desert, moving down from the north. You can see so far away through vistas great and various as the fronts move through draping their bands of rain.

We got to the Schulman Grove in a late sunny afternoon. We were lucky, the ranger said as it had been snowing, the road into Methusala Grove still closed due to drifting snow.

We walked the trail to 10,00 elevation — you can feel the thinness of the air — where trees live that are older than the pyramids. I touched the branch of one, held it. Palpable vibrations.