Photography | Bristlecone Pines | Eastern California

America’s Most-Photogenic Tree is Dead — D-E-A-D — Dead!

But that doesn’t stop the Internet from waxing poetic about how it is the oldest living thing on Earth

The Sentinel, a dead bristlecone pine that sprouted on this ridge some 3,500 years ago, but expired around the time Christopher Columbus landed in the New World, twists skyward, its amber, wind-polished wood catching the last rays of a setting sun. (Photo: ©Craig K. Collins)

Some 3,500 years ago in the White Mountains of Eastern California — at 10,270 feet to be exact — a pair of trees sprouted on a rocky outcrop of rust-hued ironite.

The pines, perched atop a windswept ridge with a commanding overlook of a grove of fellow bristlecones, as well as the imposing 14,000-foot Sierra Crest across the Owens Valley to the west, took root and grew, twisting slowly upward, inch by inch, year by year, century by century, into a pair of burly, gnarled specimens that is the signature of their species.

For nearly all of their three-and-a-half millennia, which began several centuries before the Trojan War, the development of the Phoenician alphabet, and the reign of King Tut, the trees remained unnoticed, unbothered and unvisited by humans.

Around the time Christopher Columbus came ashore on an island on the opposite side of the North American continent, one of the bristlecone siblings expired.