a poem as lovely as a tree. Author Alex Ross, who wrote a long article about bristlecone pines in the Jan. 20, 2020 New Yorker Magazine, would likely support Joyce Kilmer.
Readers of the Methuselah Report know that "Breaking News" is not our forte. We are drawn to what has been seasoned by time (like all my neighbors here at Russellville Park). And that's what brings us to the bristlecone pines (pinus longaeva) that grow exclusively in America's subalpine region of the Great Basin, which stretches from the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains to the Wasatch Range in Utah. You can find bristlecone pines growing on the western slope of the White Mountains in Arizona, and that growth is exceedingly slow. It takes decades for a bristlecone to reach the height of a human. One special characteristic of this tree is that no two are alike; each one being an individual and as the millennia go by becomes contorted and wraithlike. But the most mind-blowing feature of the bristlecones is that they are the oldest living organisms on planet Earth.
What was considered the oldest Bristlecone ever tested (by taking a drill core and then counting the rings) was found on the western slope of the White Mountains in Arizona. It was named Methuselah. It lost that honor when a graduate student named Donald Currey created a heinous crime against nature when he cut down (with permission from the Forest Service) a huge Bristlecone named Prometheus because he couldn't get a good core sample. A count of the rings proved Prometheus to be the oldest known living organism on earth: 4,900 years. Now murdered by a a soulless idiot and a complicit Forest Service.
It is mind-boggling to think of all the human history taking place while Prometheus was slowly growing on that mountain in Nevada. Migrations of humans over continents. The thoughts of Pyramids dancing in the heads of Pharaohs. Empires rising and falling. Lawrence Welk charming the music lovers of America. The now-oldest Methuselah bristlecone is protected by anonymity. Its identifying plaque has been removed (visitors were breaking off souvenirs) and today looks like just another nondescript bristlecone.
If you're landscaping your backyard, planting bristlecone pines might prove to be a poor choice since you would get only three or four inches of growth before you die.
