The Crusades. The birth of Jesus. Ancient Greece. The Roman
Empire. There are trees growing in California that were thousands
of years old when these historical events occurred. A Bristlecone
pine named Methuselah, the oldest living creature on earth, resides
in the White Mountains of California. It is 4,767 years old.
The Crusades. The birth of Jesus. Ancient Greece. The Roman Empire.
There are trees growing in California that were thousands of years old when these historical events occurred. A Bristlecone pine named Methuselah, the oldest living creature on earth, resides in the White Mountains of California. It is 4,767 years old.
Pause a moment and imagine that. We call it ancient history or the rise of western civilization – all of those events we studied in school that happened so long, long ago are just pages in Methuselah’s scrapbook. When Marco Polo traveled the Silk Road, when Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire, when Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree, a little sapling, already thousands of years old, rocked back and forth bending to California’s mountain winds.
I have written several times about the country on the east side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. For someone interested in natural history, there is a lifetime of exploring to do there.
East of the highest portion of the Sierras is the Owens Valley. After the Sierra have squeezed nearly every bit of rain and snow out of eastbound storm fronts, little moisture is left. So, the Owens Valley is high, dry desert covered by little more that Great Basin sagebrush and creosote bushes that reach up from the Mojave Desert to the south.
The Great Basin Bristlecone Pine grows at elevations from 9,000 feet to nearly 12,000 feet in the White Inyo Mountains, the range that forms the eastern boundary to the Owens Valley. In an environment that is brutal – 12 inches of rain a year, freezing temperatures, barren rocky soil – the Bristlecone prefers to expose itself to gale force winds on prominent locations rather than seek shelter. How do these trees outlive all other creatures in such an inhospitable environment?
Ironically, the brutal conditions where Bristlecone pines live actually contribute to their longevity. Trees living in lower more protected locations grow faster but die sooner because the moisture there is a breeding ground for fungi and bark beetles that can infest breaches made in the bark by fire, birds or other animals. The oldest specimens are found in the highest and driest sites where fungi and other creatures that might damage the trees cannot survive.
The Bristlecone uses other strategies to survive such a long time. Pines usually shed their needles every few years, but Bristlecone needles persist up to forty years providing a steady source of nutrition from those food factories. If wind and erosion expose and kill a portion of the tree’s roots, the corresponding portion of the tree will die back. Some of these monarchs are a contorted sculpture of mostly dead wood, but the tree lives on.
Bristlecone pines are a valuable tool for the science of dendochronology. As trees grow, the width of their rings varies according to climatic fluctuations. Dendochronologists are able to map regular patterns in tree ring width to mark specific historical dates. They can determine, for example, when a timber holding up the roof in an Anasazi ruin was cut down, thereby dating its construction.
When Edmund Schulman discovered the Bristlecone pines in the White Inyo Mountains in 1953, he learned that because they lived in a dry environment, they were very sensitive to rainfall fluctuations from year to year and left a very clear record. Schulman had discovered a new tree species that gave a clear picture going back almost 5,000 years.
If you do the trip I have talked about down Highway 395 through the Owens Valley and Mono Basin, you will spend most of your time turning west up the laterals into the Sierras. But when you reach Big Pine, turn east into a range of mountains that boasts a 14,000-foot peak of its own. Those desolate peaks are home to the world’s oldest living creatures.
