Bristlecone Pine

Postcard from the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest

ken was reluctant to publish this. It is more sentimental than his usual cheeky posts, but I like it. I think you might too.

The Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest sits in the tree-line transitional zone above ten thousand feet in California’s White Mountains, across the Owens Valley from the Sierra Nevada. We ascended through sagebrush, then pinyon, then to what looked like bare ground. I wondered whether we’d missed the forest. Perhaps we’d taken a wrong turn.

Photo credit: Anne McClard, Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, Big Pine, CA

Near the top, there’s a turnout where the Sierra looms high above the valley. When we rounded the corner, I heard Anne draw a breath as if startled. The vista is so expansive that we knew not to try to photograph it. Instead, we stood in silence. From that elevation, the mountains somehow look larger than they do from the valley floor, which feels backward. Distance is supposed to shrink things.

Then we went around another bend, and the Bristlecone pines appeared, scattered across the slope as though waiting for us to stop admiring the mountains.

The Sierra overwhelmed us, and the Redwoods we saw near Oakland the day before left us in awe. But Bristlecones looked sculpted, each a work of art, crafted over hundreds and thousands of years.

Juniper, the ranger in the visitor center, told us that most of what looks like a living tree is dead wood. The living part is often just a narrow strip of bark carrying water from the roots to a handful of green branches.

Out on the trail, I studied each twisted tree, trying to discern which one, which part was alive, and which was the oldest. I began looking for the ribbon of living bark. Every tree had one. No two seemed to wear it the same way. I couldn’t help but wonder whether the living part shaped the tree, or whether it followed the tree shapes.

Juniper had said, Bristlecones add about an inch to their tree girth every hundred years. A hundred rings. I did what any grown adult would do. Measured every trunk I saw with my thumb.

An inch a century seemed impossible. A hundred years suddenly seemed much smaller than I’d imagined. Before long, I forgot to assess each tree’s age and began studying form, observing them as individuals.

Other than people, nothing bothers them up here, Juniper had said. No insect pest bore into them, no fungus that can get a foothold, no other trees vying for water or light. No other tree could endure this mix of wind, rock and cold.

I looked around at the bare dolomite. The wind hadn’t subsided since we left the parking lot. I thought, no other living thing would put up with this godforsaken place. A minute later, I realized that this was how these trees survived. Nothing else wanted to live here.

The trail wound between dozens of trees. One looked like a carved driftwood sculpture; its trunk polished silver by centuries of wind. Another leaned sideways at an oblique angle, defying the force of gravity; it should have fallen long ago. Some of the trees carried only a thin ribbon of living bark that twisted upward through gray deadwood. Others were almost completely green. Some stood alone on bare dolomite, their roots mostly above ground. Others shared the mountainside with patches of paintbrush and other wildflowers.

I caught myself wondering what each tree had spent the last four thousand years looking at. Some looked out across the Sierra. Others faced back into the White Mountains. One stood alone above a wash where almost all the soil had eroded.

Trunks from past fires remained among the living, blackened but present. Logs lay where they had fallen, decaying so slowly in the dry mountain air they looked as though they had fallen only yesterday.

Every time I thought I’d found the most interesting tree, the next one proved me wrong.

After a while, I stopped thinking of these pines as belonging to a forest. They felt more like individuals. No two had arrived at old age in quite the same way, in the same ways we do.

Their roots lie close to the surface, Juniper said, and erosion is one of the few things that can kill a Bristlecone. Strange to think that a careless person in hiking boots poses more danger than another century of snow.

My wife’s mother, Megan, loved Bristlecone pines. Long before I knew her, she kept photographs of trees she had met on her computer and her bookshelf. Years later, when Anne started a small publishing company to bring Megan’s memoir into print, she chose the Bristlecone pinecone (Aristata Pinus) as its symbol.

I always assumed she chose it because it was a long-lived tree. A memoir. Some vague connection between longevity and wisdom. Now I am less sure.

I stopped beside one tree and laid my hand against its trunk. It was warmer than I expected. I’d somehow imagined ancient trees as cold objects.

I looked again in wonder at the ribbon of living bark disappearing into dead wood, at the polished twists where the trunk had turned in direction, at a fallen ancestor that had probably slept on the mountainside longer than my country had existed.

I wished I’d asked Megan about her Bristlecone Pines trees, the ones she loved in Colorado. Not why she loved them but what she noticed. She never made it the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, and Anne said several times that she wished her mother were with us.

I think she was.