Everything in the world is a disaster so I asked my brilliant science-writer bff @mdlaplante where I should go to feel awe and joy.

. @mdlaplante said to spend a night inside the largest, oldest living organism

~and I did~

HAVE Y'ALL HEARD ABOUT PANDO

Pando is an aspen. Picture an aspen. That’s Pando.
LOL JUST KIDDING, YOU HAVE NO IDEA.

Okay here is the deal. Pando looks like this. Its a forest, right?
RIGHT???

But every “tree” you see at Pando, aka I SPREAD, is actually a stem branching off a
SINGLE
GIANT
UNDERGROUND
SUPERORGANISM
!!!!!

Not tangled-up-roots or interconnected-systems. I’m talking ONE DUDE. PANDO IS ONE GUY. (Yeah, Pando's male. Talk about manspreading.)

What’s the biggest thing you can think of? A blue whale? Is that it? Get with the program bro

A blue whale, which is the thing you THOUGHT was biggest, you FOOL, weighs like 181,000 kg, give or take a few sedans. PANDO LAUGHS.

Pando, which I will remind you is AN ASPEN, weighs
SIX
~MILLION~
KILOGRAMS.

That’s like thirty three of your puny little WHALES

POP QUIZ: HOW MANY ACRES IS A BLUE WHALE?
A whale is something like a 15x100-foot cylinder with a tail on one end and a face on the other…

So using A=2πrh+2πr2 as a rough tool... you could unfurl a blue whale like a cannoli and it would only cover like .11 acres
(ish)

It would take you 963 blue whale rugs to cover the acreage that Pando covers
DO YOU HAVE 963 BLUE WHALES? I THOUGHT NOT*

*(there's 10-25k blue whales left, but even if you "have" them I discourage you from treating them like fruit roll-ups to redecorate Pando)

Pando is enormous and fucking beautiful and full of wild roses and juniper and hummingbirds and deer and hawks and shit

And are you ready to LOSE YOUR MIND Y’ALL

~*YOU CAN CAMP INSIDE OF PANDO*~

https://www.fs.usda.gov/fishlake/ 

CAN YOU CAMP INSIDE A WHALE??
APPARENTLY NOT IF YOU WANT THE WHALEWATCHING PEOPLE TO LET YOU BACK ON THE BOAT EVER AGAIN

“Don’t bring your tent on the whalewatching boat, Sarah”
“You aren’t allowed to make s’mores inside the whales, Sarah”
~Whatever~
Anyway

With a hammock and a camping reservation you can spend the night cradled in the arms of the largest, oldest thing that has ever lived

You can drive into a living God and experience seraphic awe okay that shit's wild
PANDO, DUDE.

My bro @mdlaplante wrote about it HERE, click for further amazement and less whale-bashing: https://www.cityweekly.net/utah/devastated/Content?oid=2305453

Oh yeah did I forget to mention how Pando is 80,000 years old

I've never met an 80,000 year old whale I'M JUST SAYING

Okay now I'm really done hating on whales

who are small and young and who can barely support a hammock FIGHT ME