Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest

Interesting facts

In the oldest trees most of the living tissue has died back, and often only a narrow strip of living tissue still connects the roots to a few living branches.

Bristlecone needles can stay green on the branch for up to about 45 years, among the longest leaf lifespans known in any plant.

Dead bristlecones resist decay so well in the cold, dry air that trunks thousands of years old still stand beside the living trees.

In the White Mountains the oldest trees tend to grow on north-facing slopes, where they average about 2,000 years, roughly twice the average on south-facing slopes.

Bristlecones compete poorly on good soils but often dominate pale dolomite slopes where few other plants manage to grow.

A researcher reported a still older bristlecone, more than 5,000 years old, in 2010, but neither the tree nor its sample core could later be found, so it remains unconfirmed.

Frost-damaged rings in bristlecone wood have been used to pinpoint the years of major volcanic eruptions in the distant past.

The species gets its name from the curved, bristle-like prickles on its dark purple female cones, which take about 16 months to ripen.

Methuselah, the forest's most famous tree, is named after the biblical patriarch said to have lived 969 years.

Clark's nutcrackers are thought to help plant the forest: seeds the birds bury and forget can sprout together and grow into multi-trunked trees.

Why it is worth it

High on the dry eastern slope of California's White Mountains, between about 3,000 and 3,400 metres, grow some of the oldest living trees on Earth. The Great Basin bristlecone pines of this forest are twisted, half-stripped of bark and polished by wind and sand into shapes closer to driftwood than timber, yet some are still alive after four or five thousand years. Their longevity owes much to the very harshness of the place: severe weather and scarce nutrients slow both growth and the processes of decay.

The most famous of them is Methuselah, a tree in the Methuselah Grove that was sampled in 1957 by the dendrochronologist Edmund Schulman and Tom Harlan, who counted 4,789 annual rings and placed its germination around 2833 BC. That makes it the oldest confirmed non-clonal living organism known, although a later attempt to reproduce the count, hampered by a missing core, arrived at a somewhat younger age. Its exact location is deliberately not signposted to protect it from vandalism. The ring sequences of these trees and other bristlecone samples have been linked into a continuous tree-ring record reaching back to around 9000 BC, with one gap of roughly five centuries, which has made them a key reference for dating the past. Limber pines grow among them, and the forest is protected within Inyo National Forest, covering about 113 square kilometres.

There are two main groves. Schulman Grove has a visitor centre and the starting point of the Methuselah Grove trail, a loop of about 7 km that passes the oldest trees and opens onto views east over the basin-and-range country of Nevada. The original visitor centre was destroyed by an arsonist in 2008 together with several pines, and has since been rebuilt. Patriarch Grove holds the Patriarch Tree, the largest bristlecone pine in the world, and is the source of Cottonwood Creek, a designated Wild and Scenic River.

Getting there

The groves lie about 48 km from Bishop in the Owens Valley. From Big Pine, State Route 168 climbs into the White Mountains towards Westgard Pass and passes the turn-off to the forest. The nearest airport is Eastern Sierra Regional Airport (BIH) at Bishop, about 17 km away in a straight line.

Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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