Bristlecones

"Patriarch" a Mere 1,500 Years Old

In this portion of the Inyo National Forest a multiple-stemmed bristlecone pine tree some 37 feet in over-all circumference near the base had been reported some years earlier by the local ranger, A. E. Noren, who had named it the Patriarch. We sampled the Patriarch and found it to be about 1500 years old, but with the typically insensitive ring growth of upper timberline.

More exciting was our discovery that on drier sites near by llived 1,500-year-old bristlecones--upper-timber-zone-trees--which were better recorders of drought years than even the Sun Valley limber pines.

Sampling the stem of a very old bristlecone pine, however, proved quite a problem, for many of them are completely unorthodox in shape. Instead of the familiar circular cross section, these trees are distorted so greatly that often it is a major puzzle to locate the early portion of the stem. The strip of living tissue in an old, eroded stem may now be growing in a direction at right angles to its direction a millennium ago.

How was I to get a complete sample from bark to center in such a tree? The tree itself offered the solution, for we could get through a series of borings around the stem, first through the bark and then through successively older parts of the eroded area. In the long dead and dry but very resinous wood our live-tree borers worked! These cores were consistent enough in ring-width patterns to be dated by overlap matching, just as the rings in the pueblo beams were matched and dated against rings in living trees.

Study of the collection of drill cores obtained in 1953 convinced me to sample stands of bristlecone pines all the way from California to colorado. By 1956 we knew that we had trees in the 4,000-year-plus class. We also knew that bristlecone pine trees were able to reach highest ages and greatest growth sensitivity at the western limit of their range. Nowhere have trees yet been sampled which approach the top ages of more than 4,500 years found in the White Mountain region of the Inyo National Forest.

In the more extensive groves of bristlecone pine in that range, trees of all ages can be found, but on the driest and most adverse sites it is easier to find a very old tree than a very young one! Even the slender little stem which looks like a sapling may show several hundred annual rings on the few inches of core from bark to center.

In 1956 we sampled what we thought would be plenty of White Mountain bristlecones to get our precise dating back into the earlier milleniums; we had already carried it back to A.D. 250. But we picked up only about 200 years during the following winter's laboratory work, and could go no farther.

| The story continues.... |

Written By: Dr. Edmund Shulman
Dendrochronologist, Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research
Associate Professor of Dendrochronology, University of Arizona, Tucson

Information received from: USDA Forest Service, Inyo National Forest

Edmund Shulman (1908 - 1958) first ventured into the Bristlecone Pine Forest in 1953 at the urging of the Forest Service District Ranger Al Noren, who had heard of Schulman's search for old trees. Dr. Shulman was attempting to extend his continuous tree-ring chronolgy when he sampled some of the trees in what is now called Schulman Grove. His discovery of living 4,000 year-old trees and eventual discovery of the oldest living tree in the world was his reward for years of persistent research.

Dr. Shulman lived to be only 49 years old, but his contribution to the science of dendrochronology and our knowledge of the natural history of the ancient bristlecone trees remains highly significant. In 1959, this area of the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest was named Schulman Grove, in his honor. The text in this handout was written by Dr. Shulman before his death as the basis for a landmark article on the bristlecone pines published in National Geographic, March 1958. It has been edited for brevity.