Living Skeletons

Great Basin Bristlecone pines (Pinus longaeva) are the oldest non-clonal species on the planet.

I don’t want to age like fine wine, I want to age like the Bristlecone pines.

Dense enough to withstand pests and diseases, resilient against icy winds, and able to grow where most vegetation can’t, Bristlecone pines exist in ways that defy the norm. They grow so slow that some years they don’t even produce a new growth ring. These trees also have sectored architecture, which means that the roots only feed the sections of tree directly above them. If that section of root dies, only the section of tree above that root dies. It is common to see bristlecone pines with only one or two living sectors.

In 1964, a Bristlecone in Nevada, known as Prometheus, was cut down and found to have 4,862 growth rings. In 2012, another tree was found to be over 5,000 years old. There may be trees even older that haven’t been dated yet.

On this trip, we saw Sequoias as well as Bristlecones. Sequoias are far more impressive to see simply because of how enormous they are. Their branches are like whole other trees growing off them. The Bristlecones look cool, but are hardly as impressive because, if you didn’t know any better, you’d think they were just small, dead trees. But they are older by thousands of years.

Some of these trees are older than the Ottoman Empire. They’re older than Jesus.

And something about that in comforting.