The bristlecone pines are a small group of pine trees (Family Pinaceae, genus Pinus, subsection Balfourianae) that can reach an age far greater than that of any other single living organism known, up to nearly 5,000 years.

My dear friend E.M.K., who passed away late last year--by her own hand, or an accidental overdose of prescription medications, we shall never know--wrote this passage about visiting the Bristlecones in California's White Mountains:

IN THE RAINSHADOW

At 10,000 feet I entered the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest.

From Schulman Grove at 10,100 feet, the Methuselah Walk set out east for the Forest of the Ancients—trees over 3,000 years old. I had heard that the oldest living trees on earth took the savageness of the elements more dead than alive. The bristles that tip the scales of their cones characterize a tree that chooses to live at the heights of the White Mountains, where violent winds snap off trunks or flay them with sand and ice, and where rainfall measures 12 inches per year. The soil in which the pines are rooted is white, like the name of the mountains. Dolomite is a highly alkaline soil low in nutrients that other plants find unbearable. However, the white surface reflects sunlight, so the soil is cool and retains more moisture than darker soils.

In other words, the conditions of hardship foster the means of survival. Sheltered trees grow faster and die younger. The ancients—gnarled stubs of exposed wood that is mostly dead—adapt by producing narrow, incomplete tree rings filled with pitch that resist decay and insects. The price of this protection is very little food storage against winter, so the trees have a growth rate of about 1 inch in girth every 100 years.

I had expected a few gray snags in isolated glory on a bleak tundra, but the white hillsides were well populated with green-haloed bristlecones. Cone-tipped branches waved shapely bundles of needles often compared to bottlebrushes or foxtails. Other bristlecones, bare of needles, were odd assortments of twigs and matchsticks poking the thin, clear air. But the trees I gazed at longest were the short, stubborn knots twisted in the throes of endurance. Ignited by intense sunlight, their trunks were molten gold marred with the impurities of a long life. Their passage through the seasons differed from mine, their movement arrested by my human shortsightedness, so that I saw the suspended animation of golden figures: the pull of a torso midstride, grain flowing in a tide of age.