It was toward the end of our latest summer of record heat and weirding weather that I finally got to go up into California’s White Mountains to see the ancient bristlecone pines.
The mountains aren’t far from the Sierra Nevada with its ample lakes and waterfalls, but they are a world apart, baking in the bigger range’s rain shadow, a province of dry pinyon-juniper woodland and sunstruck sage slopes.
And the pines, once you get up high enough. Try ten thousand feet, which means you’ve toiled up more than one iteration of winding mountain road steep enough to tax the Subaru. We were something like seven thousand feet higher than the Area 51 Alien Travel Center, where we’d stopped for gas and coffee a couple of hours earlier, and there’d been ample occasion for chortles about the Crosstrek’s lack of oomph on the Great Basin’s wide-open uphills. I didn’t care. As I had not yet been wise enough to know back when I was in high school with those guys, I am more inclined toward marathon than sprint, and so is the little car that we were taking camping. It and I were a good match, dogged, not flashy. Up we went.
Much as I like to imagine myself, the bristlecones are creatures of the mountain heights, and on the scattered ranges of the Great Basin they specialize in tufting the high places where little else grows. They are surrounded by sharp edges: harsh sunshine, frigid cold, desiccating wind, ground underfoot that is more jagged talus than soil. In winter, their trunks are etched and polished by wind-driven pellets of ice. Though it is a fact that bristlecones were truly named for having bristly cones, I prefer to think of their groves themselves as clumps of bristles that, when you scan them from below, stand surprising and unkempt, a topographical bad hair day. Trees? Way up there?
Yes, they were. And soon we were too. We were there to celebrate a milestone birthday for my friend Mark, who is as enamored of weird botany as I am. It was the same one Andy and I had celebrated a few months earlier. The location seemed appropriate, if only in the obvious sense that a bristlecone pine grove has the ability to make a handful of decades seem a pretty trivial span of years. These are trees that live 4,000 years and more, their dense wood resisting rot and, year by year, inscribing minute growth rings that can be, and have been, precisely dated by dendrochronologists.
Walking among ancient trees could on the one hand assure us that from their perspective we weren’t very old at all. But on the other hand it was also a reminder that however many years we have left was likely to be an even smaller blip, one that would leave hardly a noticeable mark in the grove we wandered through. On this road trip, it was hard to avoid the realization that there was more in the rear-view mirror than through the windshield. As we strolled among the ancient pines and boulder slopes, with vast vistas of mountains and valleys just beyond, it was easy to develop the impression of being surrounded by emissaries of eternity.
But a closer looked showed that was not quite the case. The trees indeed live a long time—long enough to see the ground beneath them move. Many of the older pines rested on a lattice of roots elevated above the ground level, because even the stoniest of ground is liable to erode away over centuries and millennia. In the 1960s a researcher, Valmore LaMarche Jr., used the trees’ growth rings to estimate how fast the ground erodes away: about a foot per thousand years, he calculated.
On the oldest-looking trees, the root structures looked like they’d been designed to form perfect hidey-holes of the sort that small children would inevitably turn into tree forts. The pines were engaged in the own sort of race with time: they have to grow their supporting roots out faster than the ground wears away. If they fail, they topple over. And they have to do this in a growing season that in these high, cold elevations is only about two months long.
Thick clouds were moving in; the wind whispered rain. This was the normal monsoon pattern, but in a few days Hurricane Hilary would move up from the south, another of those tropical storms whose power is enhanced by the warming of the oceans. It was forecast that the White Mountains would receive more rain in a day than they typically did all summer.
We headed down, hoping we could find a sheltered camping spot before the rain began. A rehydrated dinner beckoned; so did a good bottle of scotch. We’d share recollections of time spent together long ago, back in high school, when we as kids growing up in a midwestern suburb felt a rock-hard certainty that the ground beneath us was solid. Now those old certitudes are gone and the only thing that seems for sure is that the years coming at us are unlikely to look anything like those that have passed.
The idea that we can learn some simple lesson from very old trees has a romantic edge to it, a core assumption that nature has a constancy to it that we can learn to decipher. This seemed true when I was born, as it had when explorers and botanists came through the Great Basin generations ago to catalog its residents. It isn’t any more. The ground is shifting fast beneath our feet, in ways that are hard to predict and harder to cope with.
This was heady stuff to mull over on an evening when we were celebrating a 60th birthday. Above us vistas of stars alternated with cloud banks that seemed to race just over the pine-studded heights. I hadn’t set up a tent, preferring to sleep out and gambling that clear skies would win out.
It worked for a while, but a couple of hours later I was roused from sleep by an alarming fusillade of drops. I made record time setting up the tent before I could crawl inside.
