Mount Charleston: The Sky Island Above the Desert

Forty minutes from the Las Vegas Strip, the elevation gain is nine thousand feet. You start in desert scrub at the valley floor and you finish in a forest of white fir and aspen at nearly twelve thousand feet. The mountain at the top is Charleston Peak, the highest point in the Spring Mountains and one of the ecological paradoxes of the Mojave region.

Charleston Peak rises to about eleven thousand nine hundred sixteen feet above sea level. The Spring Mountains that surround it function as what ecologists call a sky island, a high-altitude ecosystem isolated by the desert that surrounds it, where species that cannot survive at lower elevations have evolved in the mountain's particular microclimate over thousands of years. The Charleston white fir grows here and essentially nowhere else. The Spring Mountains beardtongue, a flowering plant, is endemic to this range. The isolation that makes the mountain unusual from a biological perspective is the same isolation that made it valuable to the Southern Paiute as a summer hunting and gathering ground, a place where resources existed that the desert floor could not provide.

Las Vegas residents drive up here in summer to escape heat that reaches one hundred and fifteen degrees at the valley floor. There is a ski area at the upper elevations. In one drive, you pass through five of the seven major ecological zones of North America.

The Spring Mountains National Recreation Area is administered by the United States Forest Service. The main trail to Charleston Peak is more than sixteen miles round trip from the trailhead. The view from the top, on a clear day, includes the Nevada Test Site to the northwest and the Las Vegas valley spread out to the southeast.