THE NEXT MORNING, a Druze park ranger named Hassam Ghanim took me up to 6,500 feet, and we entered the al-Shouf reserve. Ghanim led me to an impressively gnarled cedar, black with age, with two trunks rising in a V. "One thousand eight hundred years," he said, "if you like and you love."

I liked and I loved. The tree was my size when Muhammad preached, the height of a house when Byzantium fell and the Ottomans arrived. It had ridden out the civil war because the Shouf Mountains were a no-go zone, the scene of brutal massacres. Wild boar, porcupines, foxes, even wolves had endured here for the same reason.

Ghanim claimed, doubtfully, that this was the "oldmost tree" in Lebanon, but there was a rival stand of cedars in the north, and I wandered that way, hoping to find some enduring lesson in the old giants' survival. This meant heading up the Bekaa Valley, whose southern reaches were a stronghold of the radical anti-Western party Hezbollah. Syrian occupation of Lebanon had run deepest in the northern Bekaa, but now Lebanese soldiers controlled the checkpoints, waving amiably beneath murals of Kalashnikov-toting Shiite martyrs. Despite the Islamist atmosphere, the Bekaa is home to Lebanon's excellent wine industry, and I had a quick snort in the tasting rooms at Château Kasara. A mixed group of Finnish, French, Irish, and Austrian tourists was over from Beirut, wandering the cool cellars and comparing notes. (Hints of sectarian feuding, with lingering aftertaste of summary execution.)

Slurring what little Arabic I could now speak, I negotiated a taxi fare to the Qadisha Gorge—UNESCO World Heritage Site, holy land of the Maronite Catholics, and heartland of Lebanon's crazed Christian militias. The towns were festooned with huge posters of war criminals, but the gorge itself was Lord of the Rings territory: sheer cliffs decorated with waterfalls and vast Catholic cathedrals skewered in God beams of light. We finally topped out at the Cedars of Lebanon, one of five ski resorts in the country. Here was the last big stand—just a few acres—of old-growth cedars, some of them having lived 2,000 years. The dense canopy of evergreen branches created a green sky.

I should have quit right there, but instead I made an impulsive and foolish dash the next morning up Lebanon's tallest peak, 10,131-foot Qurnat as Sawda, just behind the ski resort. Equipped with some croissants I'd stolen from the hotel breakfast, I hiked uphill for three hours, but was ultimately turned back by dense fog at about 9,000 feet. Using a compass, I navigated my way back to the top of the ski lift. It was off-season, but three construction workers built a trash fire to warm me up. "USA good!" they shouted. "Bush good!" They were Christians. Anyone who bombed Muslims was "OK!" with them. This included Israel ("Very good!") and Ariel Sharon ("Number one!"). They danced around the fire, shouting out their idiot ski-bum agenda for the future. "Drinks good," they screamed. "Girls good! Marijuana good! Bomb all Muslims!"