Earth’s Oldest Tree Has Endured in California’s Arid Desert for 4,855 Years

Before the Egyptians built the pyramids, before Jesus Christ was born, before the Roman Empire was formed or fell, the trees were already here.

In the White Mountains of central California, 3,000 meters above sea level, in an arid alpine desert where few other creatures can live, there are groves of majestic and twisted pine trees of the species Great Basin bristlecone (pine longaeva), some of which have survived for nearly 5,000 years. Their multicolored trunks bend at gravity-defying angles, and their bare branches shoot skyward, as if they’ve come from the imagination of Tim Burton or JK Rowling.

These millenary organisms, generally seen as the oldest trees on Earth, seem to escape the restrictive laws of nature.

“Bristlecone pines look magical in this regard,” said ecologist Constance Millar, who has studied pine trees that grow uniquely in California, Nevada and Utah for more than three decades. Strolling through the Forest of Ancient Bristlecone Pines in Inyo County, where these conifers have survived for millennia, “gives you a sense of infinity,” she said.

I recently traveled to Bishop, a small town in the arid Owens Valley that was once used as a setting for Westerns (and could still be used), to visit the sacred forest nestled in the nearby mountains. My walk had an atmosphere of pilgrimage, as we Californians feel more reverence for our trees than for virtually anything else.

California is home to the tallest, largest and oldest trees in the world. Hyperion, a 115-meter tall sequoia, is taller than the Statue of Liberty. General Sherman, the largest tree on the planet in terms of volume, causes astonishment in anyone who visits Sequoia National Park. And here, Methuselah (Methuselah), the king of hardy bristlecone pines, is seen to have germinated 4,855 years ago.

But these trees face diverse challenges arising mainly from climate change. Severe drought in the western United States fuels megafires that have destroyed giant sequoias, once considered largely fire-resistant. And Constance Millar published research recently revealing that scolythids (small bark-eating beetles), whose populations are exploding due to warmer temperatures, are, for the first time, killing bristlecone pines.

Still, Millar said she was hopeful about the pines’ chances of survival. Scolitids do not appear to be harming bristlecone pines in the Inyo National Forest, and the insects are native predators, so they pose less of a threat than imported pests that the trees have not evolved to resist, she said. Furthermore, studying the resilience of trees over the millennia seems to have given Millar some serenity about what the future may hold for them.

“I’m not hopeless,” she said. “I see this dream of life lasting over time.”

Deep in the Inyo National Forest, following a desolate trail accessible only by foot, gnarled trees cling to a rocky slope. This is Methuselah Grove, in which several pine trees have already been confirmed to be over 4,000 years old. Which one is the Methuselah in fact is information kept secret by the US Forest Service to protect the millenary specimen from vandalism, although visitors always try to guess.

A father and son recently stopped to admire one of the larger pines, with especially long, tangled roots. “It can only be this tree here,” declared the father, scanning the woods for other possible candidates.

Millar is one of the few people — mostly researchers and Forest Service officials — who have knowledge of Methuselah’s exact location. According to her, the tree does not look especially remarkable. Others who know her have confirmed that she is neither the biggest nor the most beautiful. All pointed out that only a select few trees have been dated, so it is possible that there are even older pines in the forest.

Jamie Seguirra, a park ranger, said a few dozen times a day visitors ask her to reveal Methuselah’s location (she is silent). But, she says, most people appreciate the effort to keep the tree healthy and safe. To reach this lonely, tree-dotted mountainside, it takes a half-day drive north from Los Angeles, another hour winding through canyons and ascending thousands of meters, until the air becomes noticeably thin.

“People who come here don’t come by chance,” Seguirra said, her voice amplified in the silence of the remote forest. “Most people say something like ‘I’ve always wanted to come here, this has always been my dream’.”

Giant sequoias were thought for decades to be the oldest trees in the world; their size would be proof of how long they’ve been growing. But in 1953 climatologist Edmund Schulman of the University of Arizona traveled to the Inyo National Forest after hearing that there were possibly even older trees there hidden in plain sight.

“Rumors like these often turn out to be unfounded. But this was not the case!” he wrote in National Geographic in 1958.

Schulman, who had been looking for ancient trees to study past droughts, was the first person to find specimens over 4,000 years old, Methuselah among them. To determine the age of a tree, scientists take a cylindrical sample from its trunk to allow counting of its rings. The thickness of these rings, each of which represents a year in the tree’s life, can also reveal information about the region’s annual precipitation levels, temperature, and even volcanic eruptions.

It’s not entirely clear why bristlecone pines are so long-lived, but one key appears to be their very slow growth — they only expand an inch every hundred years — which makes their wood especially compact and gives them added protection from insects. and decomposition. And the air in the Inyo National Forest is so dry, the climate so cold, and the rocky dolomite soil — whose color gives the White Mountains its name — is so arid that the pines face little competition from other plants, animals or pests.

Researchers in Chile recently revealed that they may have discovered an even older tree, but its age has yet to be officially verified.

Bristlecone pines have survived and witnessed so much that they are essentially living fossils. Studying the rings of these ancient trees has allowed scientists to improve the accuracy of radiocarbon dating and create records of the last 11,000 years of Earth’s climate, essential for understanding the impacts of global warming.

Wearing a baseball cap over her white ponytail, Mary Matlick, another ranger, pointed to a steep slope near the visitor center on which a 2,800-year-old bristlecone pine stands, with smooth, spier-like branches projecting out of the green cup.

The tree let some of its branches die to conserve energy — another survival strategy used by the species. It can continue to live and reproduce with just a strip of bark and a bunch of needles, Matlick explained. And because of the dry climate, dead branches don’t decompose, but can instead remain attached to the trunk for another thousand years, giving the trees their classic ghostly appearance.

“When people ask me, ‘Is she alive or dead?’ I sometimes say ‘yes,'” Matlick said.

^{Translation by Clara Allain}