The White Mountainsand the Age of Species

It was morning and we were somewhere just east of Mojave, on the road heading east. Soon the hot Owens Valley was laid before us and soon we were gaining elevation and into the White Mountains, on the road east of Big Pine and through desolate scrub foothills, and then through an immensity of Pinon and Juniper woodlands.

Lily was at the console, keeping the truck's engine heat between medium and high. Keeping the truck from overheating is a game on this heated incline.

We pulled air from the engine to regulate the temperature as we took on narrow and steep grades to a height somewhere above eleven thousand feet. The vegetation thinned, the skies darkened with clouds, and the gnarled high-altitude limber pines were hanging over the road. White dolomite shards covered the high slopes of these mountains, and thus, the name 'White Mountains.'

It was a J.R.R. Tolkien landscape and I remembered this passage:

"The world is gray, the mountains old, The forge’s fire is ashen-cold."

At the high tundra peaks, twisted pines shot up from the steep dolomite cliffs. Many of these bristlecone pines were brewing sap long before Abraham emerged from the wilderness. They are witch trees — leathered from millennia, worn, tattered and distant. They persist only here and other far reaches of the Great Basin, at the brink of death. These trees, and in particular the anonymous 4,800 year old Methuselah, may be the oldest living organisms on Earth.

"The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost."

Here, on the border of Nevada and near the summit of the highest of the White Mountains and the third highest peak in California, is one of the driest regions on Earth.

It is harsh weather, especially considering that any precipitation is likely snow or ice. Deserts are defined not by heat but by a low presence of water. And so, we are standing on the western edge of the Great Basin Desert, the largest in the United States. These bristlecone pines survive best when devoid of moist soil, insects, or warmth. Some of the dead wood scattered on these slopes is more than 8,000 years old. The tree's ability to persist in such conditions is hard to grasp; the length of their lives is even more so.

The Oldest Living Thing on Earth

Sometimes, people will say that the bristlecone pine is the oldest living organism on Earth. They are so old that dendrochronologists used their rings to correct our radiocarbon dating.

But what really is the oldest living thing on Earth?

Lots of different people have lots of different answers for this question. It's interesting to note that a lot of these questions can be answered within a hundred miles from these White Mountains. The world's largest tree, a Giant Sequoia, lies just beyond view to the west of here. The world's tallest trees, most of them lie just northwest of here. And just southwest of here, in the heart of the Mojave Desert lies a simple bush, a creosote bush, which some people say is unquestionably the longest-living organism out there.

Still, we look at the bristlecone as the oldest continuously-living single organism.

Methuselah was 4,789 years old when Edmund Schulman and Tom Harlan cored it in 1957. By that count it is about 4,858 today, a seedling when the first pyramids were rising in Egypt. The Forest Service still keeps its location secret.

Even that number has a story, though. Schulman’s original core has gone missing, and when University of Arizona dendrochronologist Matthew Salzer counted what survives, he came up nearly two hundred years short. Harlan later claimed a tree on these slopes more than 5,000 years old, but after he died in 2013 no one could find the tree or its core. And in 1964, a graduate student in Nevada got permission to cut down a bristlecone on Wheeler Peak called Prometheus. Only once it was on the ground did anyone count its rings: at least 4,862, older than Methuselah.

Then there is Gran Abuelo, a Patagonian cypress in southern Chile. In 2022, scientist Jonathan Barichivich, who grew up near the tree, estimated it at around 5,484 years, with an 80 percent chance that it is older than 5,000. He could not bore all the way to its center, so the figure comes from a partial count and a statistical model. Many tree-ring scientists won’t accept it until someone counts every ring, and Barichivich has said the point is to protect the tree, not to drill a bigger hole in it.

A Tree That Keeps Its Own Calendar

How does a bristlecone do it? Mostly by doing very little. Near treeline, a bad year might add a ring thinner than a sheet of paper, or no ring at all. The wood that grows that slowly is dense and full of resin, and it resists rot, fungus and insects. The oldest trees grow on the poorest dolomite, where little else can live, so there is almost nothing to burn and nothing to compete with. And each root feeds its own strip of bark and its own branches. When drought or erosion kills a root, only its strip dies. That is why the oldest bristlecones are mostly bleached dead wood, kept alive by a narrow ribbon of living bark.

In March 2026, scientists at UC Davis published the bristlecone’s genome. It holds some 24 billion base pairs of DNA, about eight times the human genome, and the trees carry longer telomeres, the protective caps on chromosomes, than other conifers. Geneticist David Neale warned that sequencing one tree does not explain why a species lives so long. It is a place to start.

The dead wood on these slopes turned out to matter as much as the living trees. It barely decays, so by matching the ring patterns of living trees to dead ones, and dead ones to older dead ones, Charles Wesley Ferguson built a year-by-year calendar reaching back more than 8,000 years. In the late 1960s, that wood showed that radiocarbon dates older than about 3,000 years were coming out too young. Once corrected, the stone tombs of Western Europe turned out to be older than the pyramids, and archaeologists had to rethink the idea that civilization spread outward from the Near East. The rings keep other diaries too. A frost ring from 1627 BC, a summer cold enough to damage the growing wood, may record the great eruption of Thera in the Aegean.

The bristlecones are not invincible. Between 2013 and 2020, drought-stressed bristlecones in Utah’s Wah Wah Mountains and on Telescope Peak, above the Death Valley I looked down on from this ridge, were killed by mountain pine beetles and pinyon ips. The beetles breed poorly in bristlecone wood. They spilled over from neighboring limber and pinyon pines, in the hottest, driest decade the trees had seen in a long time.

One Plant, Twelve Thousand Years

The bristlecone is the oldest thing on Earth that has lived as a single, continuous body. But if you let a living thing clone itself, the numbers get much bigger, and the first answer lies just southwest of here, in the Mojave.

The creosote bush is widespread throughout North America’s deserts. It is spindly, and its leaves are a peculiar lime-brown. Individual plants live about two hundred years, but the plant reproduces itself by sending out new root systems and springing new stems from the same genetic material. As the old center dies, the new growth spreads outward in a ring.

The oldest of these rings, King Clone in the Mojave’s Lucerne Valley, was dated in 1980 by UC Riverside botanist Frank Vasek to about 11,700 years, by measuring how fast its ring of stems spreads outward. No single stem is that old. The individual is the ring.

In the Fishlake National Forest of Utah, a grove of quaking aspen called Pando covers about 106 acres. Its roughly 47,000 trunks all rise from one root system and share one set of genes, which makes it a single organism weighing around 6,000 tons. In 2024, a team studying the small mutations that pile up in its cells over time estimated Pando to be at least 16,000 years old, and possibly as old as 80,000. Its trunks live about a century. The organism may have lived since the ice age. Today it is thinning, because deer and cattle eat the young shoots before they can replace the old trees.

There are others. A Palmer oak clone in the Jurupa Hills near Riverside is thought to be at least 13,000 years old. On a mountain in Sweden, a Norway spruce called Old Tjikko grows from roots radiocarbon-dated to about 9,550 years. And in 2022, scientists found that a meadow of ribbon weed seagrass in Western Australia’s Shark Bay is one plant, stretching 180 kilometers and at least 4,500 years old.

The Fungus Under the Blue Mountains

Oregon, where I live now, has its own giant. Beneath the Malheur National Forest near Prairie City, a single honey fungus, Armillaria ostoyae, spreads under about 2,385 acres, close to four square miles. It moves through the soil in black, shoestring-like strands, a few feet a year, and works its way into tree roots, killing the trees over decades and then eating the dead wood. Aboveground, all you might see is a stand of dying firs and, in autumn, clumps of honey mushrooms at their bases. Based on how fast it spreads, scientists estimate it at anywhere from about 2,400 to 8,650 years old. It is one of the largest living things ever found.

Slow Animals

Animals rarely come close to these numbers, but a few in cold, deep water try. A glass sponge from the East China Sea, Monorhaphis chuni, was estimated in 2012 to be about 11,000 years old, from growth layers in its giant silica spine. A black coral off Hawaii was radiocarbon dated to more than 4,000 years. In 2016, scientists dated Greenland sharks by the proteins in the lenses of their eyes, which form before birth and never change. The oldest was likely around 400 years old, and they may not mature until they are well past a hundred. Their genome, sequenced in the last two years, is about twice the size of ours and carries extra copies of genes involved in repairing DNA. An ocean quahog clam dredged off Iceland in 2006 turned out to be 507 years old, born in 1499. Bowhead whales have been found carrying harpoon points from the 1800s. And the tiny immortal jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii, cheats altogether. When it is injured or starving, it can turn back into a young polyp and begin its life again.

Life That Waits

Then there are the things that don’t so much live long as wait. In southeastern New Mexico, nearly two thousand feet under the desert in the Salado Formation near Carlsbad, scientists found bacteria in suspended animation inside crystals of salt. When they fed them nutrients, the bacteria revived themselves and: Boom! Two hundred and fifty million year old life. The finding was published in 2000, and many microbiologists still doubt it, because the bacteria’s DNA looks almost identical to bacteria living today, and contamination is hard to rule out. But in 2020, Japanese and American scientists fed microbes from seafloor mud in the South Pacific that had been buried for up to 101.5 million years. Nearly all of them woke up and began to multiply.

Larger things wait, too. In 2023, a roundworm frozen in Siberian permafrost for about 46,000 years was thawed and began to reproduce. Russian scientists grew flowering plants from fruit tissue a ground squirrel had cached in its burrow, frozen in the permafrost for 32,000 years. And in 2005, a seed from the ruins of Masada, about 2,000 years old, sprouted into a Judean date palm. They named it Methuselah.

So what is the oldest living thing on Earth? It depends on what you are willing to call one life. A clone, a fungus, a sleeping microbe and a tree that has been awake every summer for five thousand years are each a different answer to what it means to stay alive. Up on that ridge, the bristlecones were still the oldest things I could walk up to and put my hand on. The roots, I understand better now, go deeper than the frost.

The confounding concept of time represented by the four thousand-year-old trees isn't doubled or tripled by the geology of this place, but multiplied by the thousands.

A City Without Perspective

500 million years ago, the rock of this mountain was settling to the floor of a shallow sea off the ancient coast of North America, long before the dinosaurs, when trilobites crawled the bottom. By the accidents of geologic history, their remains are still up here.

Today, its peaks are rounded, its ridges dulled and its forms subdued. It is altogether an unspectacular sight from afar. As we near the end of the 'American Century', a vast network of changes are before us, a transformation. To comprehend the speed of the change, it is humbling to stand here in a range of infinite oldness and history. It is perspective beyond compare.

Looking down into the Owens Valley, I see the layout of a very familiar story to the people of Central California. Dry lakes, empty dustbowls. Once this land was green and filled with lakes. Big lakes, small lakes and in between lakes. It is an ecosystem that has been devastated in a matter of a century, all for the sake of Los Angeles, a desert city which made a desert out of Central California in order to build a mirage for itself; that it is, in fact, not a desert city. It began with a sip, a drink of Central California, and then in no time the lakes below went empty.

Everything below me now looks as miserable as the scrub brush of Los Angeles. For all it is worth, this is a transformation that has just begun. To people who have lived for centuries in the desert, the Berbers, the Mongolians the desert is clean and graceful, to be respected for its life-bringing. In new desert cultures, there is no sense of respect, from the wasteland we call Texas to the coastal chaparral of Los Angeles, people moved here out of want and ambition, not for climate or landscape. Los Angeles has always been an ugly place. Long before smog, Los Angeles still yielded no true blue sky. The mix of inland dust settling in the valleys, the dying brown of the hills, the sick Grey of the sky, and the sun shining through. All of these from natural origin.

No doubt then, that people who moved here were those who had no concept of nature; it was separate, to be conquered and avoided. The children, too, of Southland settlers are prone to this idea of Earth. Born unto a land of endless highway and street-corners and city blocks, the young Angeleno is suppressed by squares and rectangles. He is, like no generation before him, a product of a world completely ignorant of open spaces. He is brought into a world that urges him to be sedentary, for whom nothing is habitual than to switch on a television and live vicariously through the lives of the sports figures he once craved to be. For him, the city blocks are his entire future, so how can he have perspective?

A city without perspective is a threat, for its people were born unto order, a sense that must produce an overabundance of left-brain confinement and an absence of imagination.

Is it no wonder that Los Angeles, a coastal city, lives as though its ocean is just a painting — with no relationship to the Pacific, the source of its primary economic influx? A week before we left for the White Mountains, I interviewed John Wood, a creation scientist, about his views on ecological issues. I wanted to understand the mindset of those who rejected evolution, and therefore the wildly successful study of biology, and everything that I saw here with my own two eyes.

He told me that he was, "distinctly suspicious of the so-called environmentalist movement because of their anti-free-enterprise orientation and because of their proliferation of unsound scare tactics." I told him that environmentalism had little to do with scare tactics; "Earth-day is monkey ecology, and so is Greenpeace. Do not defer to the fringe to make your arguments. They are not the core, they did not sit 365 days of the year in a small post in Antarctica collecting data."

I told him there was "evidence to suggest that evolutionary lineages are being broken at in a way that may impair your ability to drive to church on Sunday mornings or even make god doubt your respect for his work." I told him that evolutionists didn't see a conflict with creationism because the two looked at very separate areas, but when he responded with talk of the communists and the tree-huggers, I responded by mentioning the word 'monkey' as much as possible and gave up trying to learn anything more. He said I was mean-spirited and hateful. I said that real scientists face criticism every day. "The search for truth demands doubt, and how can you make conclusions before drawing reasonable hypotheses?" I had confirmed stereotypes. Creation scientists had nothing to say of value, but their influence on the sedants of Los Angeles was huge.

After all, in the Southwest we are prone to elect our religious — and often protestant fundamentalist creationists, to office, and after so many city blocks and strip malls, is it not easy to accept his pseudo-science?

The Methuselah Trail

We parked in a small lot at the edge of a vast bristlecone forest, and began the hike up along a narrow path cut into the steep dolomite grades. At the ridgeline, we could see hundreds of miles — first the Saline Valley, and beyond that, Death Valley.