The Great Basin Bristlecone Pine

Bristlecone Pine

Have you ever wondered where the oldest trees on earth reside? Or maybe what kind of tree they are? It seems as though lots of us (including myself) just assumed they were the giant redwoods (something like lodgepole pines, or the giant Sequoias). But that's not true. I was listening to an NPR show the other day and heard a story, a sad but true one, about the oldest tree (and thus oldest living thing) ever discovered on earth. After a little additional digging I got the whole scoop.
The story starts in eastern Nevada, in a group of mountains called the Snake Range. I happen to be intimately familiar with these mountains because I spent the better part of a month exploring them over the course of two summers while teaching SJSU field camp. Anyway, the highest peak in the range is Mt. Wheeler. It is located within the boundary of what is now called Great Basin National Park (where we camped). It also includes Lehman Caves which are pretty cool.
High up on Mt. Wheeler there is a grove, or group  of Great Basin Bristlecone Pines that resided on the harsh and unfriendly slope of the mountain. Unlike how they sound, bristlecone pines don't really look like pine trees. They are gnarled, and appear dead for the most part. They have this tortured look about them as if someone took a regular tree and bent and twisted it into a grotesque sculpture and then stripped it of its green. But at the same time, they are incredibly beautiful too. I have had many opportunities to see bristlecones up close and while they are ugly in a way, they have a regal defiance about them, that makes them...extraordinary. They are old but brave. They are bombarded by freezing cold, blazing sun, very little water and nutrient poor soils, yet they patiently eek out a living  in a little patch of barren earth they have called home for hundreds or thousands of years.
Getting back to my point though, there was one particular tree in this grove on Mt. Wheeler named Prometheus. Notice I said "was". This is the sad part of the story. As it goes a grad-student from the University of South Carolina was doing some climate work for his thesis. His name was (is, he's still alive) Donald Currey. Part of his project was drilling cores into these old trees to get information about the climate over the past few millenia by a process called dendrochronology. He claims that while he was trying to drill a core into Prometheus his drill broke. He immediately became concerned because he didn't have another one, and if he didn't get his sample he would have to wait a whole year to get back out in the field and collect the data. Apparently he consulted the Forest Service (it wasn't a national park yet) and they shrugged and basically said, "Well, just chop it down. There are a bunch more trees up there. One won't make a difference." So that's what he did. It was only afterward (according to Currey), as he was tracing the rings of the tree back through time that he realized how ancient the tree was. But by then it was obviously too late.
How old was this gnarly old tree? Best estimates put it at 4862 years old, but it may have been over 5000.
It's hard to imagine that tree sitting up on that slope for five thousand years. It's hard to imagine that 'Prometheus' had already been living for three thousand years before Jesus was (supposedly) born! Or even more incredible think of this, it was a sapling when animals like cave lions still roamed the earth!
It's amazing that one man was able to do in just a few minutes what thousands of years of natural adversity and lightning were unable to. It's really sad too.

A slice of Old Prometheus

And that's the story of the oldest living thing ever discovered on earth, from beginning to tragic end. One good thing did come of this disaster however. Since the discovery of the bristlecone pines extreem age, they are now protected by the government through the National Parks Service and other means. Old Prometheus may be gone, but if you'd like to see his buddies, other trees he spent thousands of years with, you can still head out to Great Basin NP, climb up Mt. Wheeler and say hello.