A quarter-mile trail doesn’t sound like much. But at 11,540 feet, we breathed hard. Unlike us, wind-twisted bristlecone pines thrive at this elevation under harsh conditions other trees can’t tolerate. The Bristlecone Loop in the Mount Goliath Natural Area on Mount Evans winds through a grove of some of the oldest living things on earth.
Bristlecones were long considered the most ancient living thing, but that claim has been overturned in recent years. Some mushroom mycelium and some creosote bush and aspen clones are older, and 500,000-year-old bacteria have been found frozen in permafrost.
Nevertheless, bristlecones retained the title of oldest tree until May of this year when Chilean researcher Jonathan Barichivich announced that a Patagonian cypress (Fitzroya cupressoides) was estimated to be 5,484 years old. Some dendrologists remain unconvinced, and the research has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Dendrology or counting tree rings is the method typically used to calculate a tree’s age. In 1964 a forest ranger helped a graduate student chop down “Prometheus” (an almost 5,000-year-old bristlecone) so its rings could be counted. Following public outrage, researchers started using a tree borer to take a core sample. Because “Alerche Milenario” in Chile was too wide for a borer to reach its center, its age was extrapolated from a partial core sample. “The objective is to protect the tree, not to make headlines or break records,” Barichivich said.
The largest and the oldest bristlecones (Pinus longaeva) grow in California’s White Mountains and in Nevada’s Great Basin. Most of the Rocky Mountain bristlecones (Pinus aristata) on Mount Evans are between 700 and 1,600 years old.
Growing slowly makes for dense, resin-rich wood resistant to insects, fungi and rot. However, not all is well with bristlecones as the climate warms and wildfires proliferate. Ecophysiologist Anna Schoettle writes that bristlecones do not adapt easily to novel stresses such as blister rust, an imported fungus.
We stand in awe of an organism able to adapt to thin soils, scarce water, and buffeting winds over many centuries and hope it can survive what humankind has wrought.
Directions:
Starting at the Dos Chappel Nature Center, the Bristlecone Loop Trail branches off the Walter Pesman Trail that continues through even more bristlecones to intersect the Alpine Garden Loop at 12,209 feet. To visit Mount Evans, you must pay a $15 fee and make a reservation at recreation.gov.
From Idaho Springs take Exit 240 off Interstate 70 and follow Colo. 103 for 13 miles. Just past Echo Lake, turn right onto Colo. 5.
Ruth Carol and Glenn Cushman are the authors of “Boulder Hiking Trails,” published by West Margin Press.
