Bristlecone Pines

Get ready to have your mind blown.  These things are OLD.

It turns out that some of the Bristlecone Pines are over 4,000 years old -- and still growing.

The tree below died in the 1600's, and if you count all the rings backwards, you find out that my finger is on a piece of wood that's more than 3,200 years old.  That means this tree sprouted out of a pine cone when the Greeks were fighting the Trojan War.  This tree was shrugging off the Winter snows, 10,000 feet above sea level, back when David killed Goliath.  This tree was around for the very first date on the Mayan calendar!  It's OLD!

These trees are so old, that if you could watch them in a fast-forward film like Jules Verne's "Time Machine", you'd see the mountain literally change around them.  In this part of the world, the mountain loses about a foot of dirt and rock every thousand years.  When you find a tree that has roots spreading out about 3 feet above the ground, you can surmise that the tree is about 3,000 years old.  That's 3,000 years of freezing winters, baking summers, fires, earthquakes, storms, squirrels, woodpeckers, bugs, lightning strikes...well, you get the idea.