The Golden State is home to the tallest, largest and oldest trees in the world, what one botany enthusiast called the “tree-fecta.”
Ten thousand feet up in the White Mountains of central California, in a harsh alpine desert where little else survives, groves of gnarled, majestic Great Basin bristlecone pines endure, some for nearly 5,000 years. Their multicolor trunks bend at gravity-defying angles, and their bare branches jut toward the sky, as if plucked from the imaginations of Tim Burton or J.K. Rowling.
I recently drove to Bishop, an outpost in the arid Owens Valley that once served as a backdrop for Westerns , to visit the hallowed forest nestled in the nearby mountains. My trek felt like something of a pilgrimage, as we Californians revere our trees above almost all else. Still, Millar said she was hopeful about the bristlecones’ survival chances. Bark beetles don’t appear to be harming the bristlecones in the Inyo National Forest, and the insects are native predators, so they are less threatening than imported pests the trees have not evolved to withstand, she said. Plus, studying the trees’ resilience through eons seems to have granted her some serenity about what the future may hold.
Jamie Seguerra, a forest ranger, said visitors ask her a few dozen times a day to disclose Methuselah’s location. But most appreciate the effort to keep the tree healthy and safe, she said. Reaching this lonely, tree-studded mountainside involves a half-day drive north from Los Angeles and a final hour snaking through canyons and climbing thousands of feet until the air becomes noticeably thin.
“Often such rumors had turned out to be unfounded. But not this one!” he wrote in National Geographic in 1958. The bristlecones have persisted through and witnessed so much that they are essentially living fossils. Studying these ancient trees’ rings has allowed scientists to improve the accuracy of radiocarbon dating and to create records of Earth’s climate going back 11,000 years, essential for understanding the impacts of global warming.
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