The Past and the Future of the Earth’s Oldest Trees / The New Yorker
Coast redwoods and giant sequoias, California’s gargantuan world-record-holding trees, can grow fifty feet or more in their first twenty years. Bristlecones rise agonizingly slowly. After four or five years, the seedling on the steep slope would have been just a few inches higher, sprouting needles in place of the embryonic shoots. The needles are a deep green, tough, resinous, and closely bunched, in groups of five. On a mature tree, they live for fifty years or more. Decades may have passed before the tree was human height, and decades more before it resembled a conventional pine. Bristlecone saplings grow straight up, with relatively sparse foliage, looking like undernourished Christmas trees. After a few hundred years—by which time the Old Kingdom of Egypt had fallen—it was probably forty or fifty feet in height.
By the time I headed back, night was falling. Light fades fast in the mountains, and I walked the last mile to the parking lot in near-darkness. But then a full moon rose, and the dolomite on neighboring slopes began to glow eerily bright, like phantom drifts of snow. The wind picked up and elicited a low, full whoosh from bristlecone branches, which swung to and fro without creaking or rustling. When the wind stopped, the forest felt like a cavernous but soundproofed space—a silent concert hall, an empty cathedral. - Alex RossClick on the image to view the portfolio
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