On the crest of the Sierra, mountains slowly dissipate, gray to green to brown to smog to my west and like a cliff they drop off into the Great Basin to the east. Clouds drift across the surface of Mono Lake. Sky Pilots bloom in the old growth forest of five inch tall perennials. Flatter surfaces in the alpine, face thrashing winds and hold no snow. Ice does not form and as the glaciers of the last two ice ages choked out and carved most of the high sierra it left these areas unscratched as they stood above the ice, like islands. Only here, soil remained, where isolated plant communities evolved, leaving unique species now endemic only to these few surfaces. And now, just as the species, with nowhere higher to go as everything gets warmer,
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