Memory keepers: The world’s oldest tree can teach us a lot about life

According to a transcript from a NOVA documentary featuring Currey, it only took a few minutes to determine which tree he wanted to sample. It was particularly grizzled and contorted—its thick trunk and skeletal limbs twisted and frozen as if the last thing it saw in a past life was Medusa. And coincidentally, it was known as “Prometheus” to local mountaineers. This was the one. 

He counted himself back to the discovery of agriculture. Then to the end of the Stone Age. After some exasperated recounts and what I can only imagine being some version of a panic attack, Currey recorded the final age of Prometheus as 4,862 years old.

What happened next differs depending on who you talk to. Some say the drill bit of his core sampler got stuck in the tree and—since it was an extremely rare bit from Sweden—needed to be retrieved. Currey, who died in 2004, simply said that coring the tree wasn’t working because the (usually) harmless holes that were being bored into the tree were too small to core. He needed another way to get to the rings. Either way, something went wrong when Currey stuck the drill bit of his core sampler into that tree and the story ends the same. 

The tree was cut down.

With permission from the US Forest Service, a crew felled the tree and Currey collected a few cross cuts of the (incredibly dense) trunk. With that, he was off, back to his desk at a local motel to start counting rings. 

There were so many, he needed a high magnification lens to see them distinctly. In only a few hours, he was back 1,000 years to 964CE—the year the Arab astronomer al-Sfifi wrote Book of the Fixed Stars and noted his discovery of the Andromeda Galaxy. An hour or two more and Currey was back to the reported birth of Jesus, as well as Prometheus’ introduction to humans, when the ancestors of modern Western Shoshone, Goshute, Ute, Paiute, and Washoe peoples inhabited the region.

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Then he counted himself back to the discovery of agriculture. Then to the end of the Stone Age. After some exasperated recounts and what I can only imagine being some version of a panic attack, Currey recorded the final age of Prometheus as 4,862 years old. However, because bristlecone pines are capable of basically closing up shop during exceptionally tough years, the trees don’t always form a ring every year like other trees. So, Prometheus’ estimated age was something more like 4,900 years old. 

Currey had killed not only the oldest tree—but the oldest living organism on Earth. 

I pass through an unremarkable barbed-wire fence and into Great Basin National Park. Looking past the groves of Aspens up to the rocky, wind-scrubbed ridges of the Snake Range, I start to wonder—if the oldest tree that we’ve found is more than 5,000 years old, then how old is the truly oldest bristlecone—the one we haven’t discovered yet? 

The mythical version of Prometheus (and the eternal punishment he suffered for bringing fire to humans) ensures that the irony of the bristlecone’s tale isn’t lost. Part of me hopes that unnamed ancient stays hidden. But there’s something fascinating, even engrossing, about a thing that has lived through the millennium—and the knowledge we can glean from it. 

I could very well be looking at something that holds an internal record of the year-long disappearance of the sun after Caesar’s death, the Little Ice Age, and the 4.2-kiloyear drought that brought the fall of the Old Kingdom in Egypt.

At the sky-scraping summit of Wheeler Peak, I sit, eating a Snickers bar. There’s no sign of Prometheus’ remnants that I can see. Carefully picking my way down an off-trail ridgeline, the high alpine desert unfurls ahead into hanging meadows of paltry alpine grasses and talus fields. How something can hang on to life here—a place heaped with rocks, intense sun, ferocious winds, and water that only flows when the snow melts—is beyond me.

My partner Sean and I march on for miles. To the next summit on the ridgeline, and the next. It isn’t until we crest Johnson Peak that we see something that looks strikingly different from the rest of the landscape—a wall of sheer limestone, layered with smears of geological time stamps. Here, this is where one grove of bristlecones in Great Basin calls home.

Despite being seriously worked from the heat, vert and mileage it took for us to get here, I break out into a shuffling jog. At the saddle of the ridgeline, they appear.

Bristlecone groves aren’t dense. The trees grow spaced out—like planets in unconventional orbits as opposed to clusters of stars. It’s a survival strategy, so catastrophic events like fires don’t demolish an entire stand at once. 

Each tree has its own shape. Some look like squat bonsais, others like petrified skeletons of Goliath. The tallest in this group only reach about 30 feet in height. And while some have bushels of green needles budding from their branches like broccoli tops, others look all but perished. 

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One tree, in particular, is smooth, and void of all bark on its west side. Its upper branches have no needles. But that bare, sun-bleached wood gives way to thick bark and greenery on the east side of the tree. It’s like an all-natural Jekyll and Hyde. Turns out, all bristlecone pines need to stay alive for generations on generations is one little lifeline. A relatively tiny strip of bark can sustain a tree for hundreds of years, shuttling water and nutrients to the parts of the tree that need it. A tree will die back during times of hardship and only retain what it is able to sustain, and even go into a dormant state during full drought conditions. So if you see a bristlecone tree that looks dead, it’s probably not. 

I walk from tree to tree, delighted, lost in the thought that I could very well be looking at something that holds an internal record of the year-long disappearance of the sun after Caesar’s death, the Little Ice Age, and the 4.2-kiloyear drought that brought the fall of the Old Kingdom in Egypt.

A bristlecone’s front-row seat to history is hard-earned. More than 65 percent of seedlings in open terrain don’t make it. Some reports state that most seedlings die within a year. But once a young tree is able to root itself into the cracks of the rocky terrain it grows in, it is all but guaranteed to stick it out for the foreseeable millennium.

And while there have recently been stories that state climate change is going to lead the bristlecone to extinction, the scientific community seems less concerned. These trees, after all, were imperative in the climate research that helped establish Mann’s Hockey Stick—the graph created by geophysicist Michael Mann to specify human-caused global warming. 

The species that has weathered global catastrophes and climate change of eons past are far more capable of surviving them than I. 

I think back to Currey. His hand in Prometheus’ downfall was a massive blow. And some even say it was a curse. There’s lore in the bristlecone research community that those who get too close to these ancients suffer, or even die young. Reportedly, after Prometheus was felled, a young Forest Service ranger was attempting to remove a slab of the tree and suffered a fatal heart attack.

After that, Currey left the study of dendrochronology entirely and made a career researching salt flats—places notoriously void of trees. But the death of Prometheus haunted him. In fact, 20-something years later during a television interview regarding his work on the Bonneville salt flats with a local Utah news station, Currey was unexpectedly asked about the death of Prometheus. He abruptly turned from the camera and ran away.

But, just like the mythic deliverance of fire, it wasn’t all in vain. Something was lost, but more was gained. Currey’s discovery helped to spur the federal designation of where I tread now—Great Basin National Park—in 1986, and the protection of the bristlecones that lie within. 

I realize it’s time for us to go. We have about 13 more miles to cover to get back to the five-gallon water jug, cold beers, and air conditioning that await us at the truck. With a pat on the trunk, I bid the Jekyll and Hyde tree farewell and hope that it might remember me.