It's been on my camping request list for years and this weekend we finally did it - we camped in the World's Largest Living Organism. Allow me to explain. About 3 hours south of us, near the ever-so-creatively-named Fish Lake, lives Pando.
Pando, The Trembling Giant, is a 100-acre aspen forest and DNA tests have confirmed that the whole forest is a single living organism, a giant grove of aspen trees that all share a single root system.
For years I've contested that depriving our children of the chance to visit and camp within the World's Largest Living Organism showed a serious lapse in parental judgement. Steve countered with the the inarguable point that it's just a bunch of trees. And so the debate circled.
But this weekend we were looking for a new place to camp and we wanted to hit some autumn leaves so off to Pando we drove!
It was cold (we were camping at about 7,000'). It was beautiful. And, yes, it looked like a bunch of trees. But it was still pretty cool knowing that all of those trees shared the same DNA!
If you're looking for a get-away with plenty of trees and a
fun fact your kids will continually mock you about but you're convinced
they secretly find kinda cool ("Wow, Mom, trees! Sure glad we got to
drive 3 hours to see identical trees that share a giant root system!")
then we can definitely recommend Pando.
Ben says it's "Pando-monium!" But he hastened to clarify that's not because it was actually chaotic there, just because it sounds cool.
I must disagree with the child - any place with the 4 Morningstar kids is bound to contain high levels of chaos. It was definitely Pando-monium.
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