Fishlake National Forest

When both of them became afraid, I wasn't reacting to my own lack of experience anymore.

The stable used several permitted routes in Fish Lake National Forest.

Our loop crossed open mountain meadows and long sections of aspen, It was supposed to take a little under five hours with the lunch stop, then we'd load the horses and drive back.

The horses had done it many times.

That's the one.

It's located in the Fishlake National Forest in Utah, and if you walk into this forest, you will see what looks like roughly forty-five thousand individual quaking aspen trees.

They look like distinct separate organisms competing for sunlight and soil space.

But genetic testing revealed something mind-boggling.

A single aspen clone can cover many acres and consist of tens of thousands of individual stems, all connected by a shared root system.

The largest known aspen clone is called Pando, located in Utah's Fish Lake National Forest.

It covers about 106 acres and is estimated to weigh about 13 million pounds, making it one of the heaviest known organisms on Earth.

Pando is estimated to be thousands of years old, though the individual stems that make up the visible forest above ground live only about 100 to 150 years each.

Utah is where you can find one of the heaviest organisms on Earth.

The trembling giant, or pando, in the Fish Lake National Forest is made up of 47,000 genetically identical trees that share the same root system.

Wow.

According to their license plates, the greatest snow on Earth.

It completely breaks our fundamental understanding of what an individual actually is.

If you, um, if you walk through the Fishlake National Forest in Utah, you see what just looks like a sprawling, totally normal forest of quaking aspens.

Right, just white bark, fluttering leaves everywhere.

Yeah, spanning over a hundred acres.

The next dollar you intelligently deploy is vastly more important to your survival than the last ten thousand dollars you lost.

That is such a powerful reframe.

So bringing this entire framework back to the Fishlake National Forest and the Pando Aspens, the visible damage of a financial hit is undeniable.

The fallen trees, the vaporized capital, the lost compounding years, that damage is real and it doesn't come back.