This California forest has a tree that’s nearly 5,000 years old. But its location is a closely guarded secret
High in the arid mountain forests of eastern California there is a living tree that’s older than the pyramids of Giza and the ancient city-state of Babylon — but its location is a secret.
The Methuselah tree, named after an especially long-living character in the Book of Genesis, is estimated to have started growing roughly 4,857 years ago in the White Mountains just north of Death Valley.
That would put its germination date around 2,833 B.C., nearly 3,000 years before the foundation of the Roman Empire and older than all Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Scientists believe it is either the oldest or second-oldest living tree known to humanity — excepting clonal colonies, in which individual trees live and die as part of the same ancient collective organism.
Even so, the Forest Service does not disclose the exact location of the Methuselah tree and has not marked it in any way, in order to protect it from vandalism.
One of Inyo National Forest’s many bristlecone pine trees, photographed in 2007 (AFP/Getty)
Methuselah is the oldest known tree in the Methuselah Grove, which stands at nearly 10,000 ft above sea level in what is now Inyo National Forest.
It’s a standout example of the Great Basin bristlecone pine, formally known as pinus longaeva. Because they are adapted to live in such harsh environments the trees are extraordinary resilient and resistant to infection.
Through a process called ‘strip barking’, even a tiny sliver of the tree can remain alive after the rest expires, with thin strands of living matter twisting up through a dense shell of dead wood.
The Great Basin bristlecone can stay alive even if 95 percent of its body has died (AFP/Getty)
But bristlecone pines aren’t the only arboreal survivors on Earth. Some scientists believe there is a Patagonian cypress tree in the rainy mountains of Chile that is around 5,400 years old.
Known as the Millennial Alerce, or sometimes Gran Abuelo (Spanish for ‘grandfather’), the tree’s age was estimated using a new statistical method that is not yet broadly accepted among researchers, rather than by the traditional way of counting rings of wood within the trunk.
Clonal colonies — that is, groups of trees that have all sprouted off from the same ancient ancestor — can persist for many millennia, even as the individual trees live and die.
Antonio Lara, a researcher from the laboratory of the Faculty of Science and Climate of the Austral University, observes the 92 ft tall ‘Alerce Milenario’ tree in Valdivia, Chile, in April 2023 (AFP/Getty)
One colony of quaking aspen in Utah, known as Pando, is thought to be between 9,000 and 16,000 years old, but is taking a beating from climate change.
There is also one bristlecone in California’s White Mountains that may be even older than Methuselah and more secret. Back in 2009, according to the tree age researcher Peter M. Brown, another researcher named Tom Harlan began studying old tree samples left to him by his predecessor.
Harlan apparently found one sample he estimated to be 5,062 years old and told Brown the tree it came from was still alive. But the actual sample seems to be missing and if Harlan knew the tree’s location he took it to his grave.
