October 20, 2002

In the land of Methuselah

Cloners target ancient bristlecone

By MIKE NORTON
Record-Eagle staff writer

   BISHOP, Calif. — The narrow trail meanders through a landscape of white rock and eerie, twisted vegetation.

   Above, the sky is an intense cobalt blue. Far below, the parched desert stretches out to the eastern horizon, tawny and brown, while the snow-capped ramparts of the Sierra Nevada rise abruptly on the west.

   These are the White Mountains of California, one of the most inhospitable environments in North America. Dry as any desert, 10,000 feet above sea level, and formed from dolomite, a dusty, alkaline rock that discourages most plant life, they look as barren from a distance as the mountains of the moon.

   But there is life here, and that’s what has drawn Copemish tree farmer Jared Milarch. Tucked away in steep canyons on these hills are the oldest known living things on the surface of the planet: bristlecone pine trees that grow to be thousands of years old. Scientists who’ve bored into them and counted their growth rings estimate that the average lifespan of a bristlecone is 1,000 to 2,000 years.

   But the granddaddy of them all is a tree named Methuselah, discovered in 1957 and dated at 4,767 years. It is so old that it was growing when the Pyramids were being built, centuries before Abraham, tens of centuries before Christ. And that’s why Milarch and his team are here; they’ve come to take cuttings and seeds from the Methuselah Tree in hopes of cloning it for the national Champion Tree Project.

   Since 1996 Milarch and his father, David Milarch, have been traveling the country collecting genetic material from America’s largest, oldest and most historically significant trees — “champion trees” — and growing clones of them. To date, more than 70 species of champion trees have been successfully cloned in nurseries and laboratories associated with the project. There are hundreds still to go.

   The Champion Tree Project has cloned champion ashes, oaks, elms and magnolias. Project scientists managed to clone Maryland’s beloved 460-year-old Wye Oak just before it was destroyed in a hurricane, and they’ve made genetic copies of the 13 last trees planted under George Washington’s personal direction at Mt. Vernon.

   But the Methuselah Tree is something different. It’s not particularly beautiful and has no commercial value; its sole claim to fame is that it has survived some very adverse conditions and survived for a very long time.

   “The question is, why?” asked Jared Milarch. “Tree immunity is going to be the next big area of study in this field. Why do some trees resist diseases and pests better than others? Is it in the genes? Nobody really knows, but we think so. And there could be important answers in this tree.”

   Terry Mock, executive director of the Champion Tree Project, puts it even more bluntly. Mock is a former South Florida real estate developer, and he’s passionately concerned about the health of America’s forests. He believes the clock is quickly running out for many tree species, and he wants to gather as much information as he can before it’s too late.

   “This is like Jurassic Park for trees,” he said. “Only instead of waiting for them to become extinct, we’re trying to get their DNA while they’re still alive. We don’t know if there’s anything especially superior about their genetics or not; that’s something that’ll take years to figure out. But if we don’t preserve it now we’ll never have the chance.”

   So far, that argument hasn’t persuaded the National Park Service to let Mock and the Milarchs take genetic samples from the “holy grail” of American trees: the 275-foot General Sherman tree in California’s Sequoia National Park. But it was persuasive enough for the National Forest Service, which has become an enthusiastic supporter of the champion tree effort.

   “Methuselah is the oldest tree in the world that has been measured and scientifically proven,” said Larry Payne, director of cooperative forestry for the Forest Service in Washington. “There may be older trees, but they have not been identified in the scientific community.”

   It was Payne who made it possible for a team from the Champion Tree Project to visit the Inyo National Forest, whose most closely guarded secret is the exact identity and location of the Methuselah Tree.

   “We don’t show people the Methuselah Tree,” said John Louth, the Forest Service’s man on the scene. A deeply tanned and extremely serious man who’s the official manager of the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, he accompanied the team on its three-hour trek to the site. “Anonymity is its best defense.”

   That’s not just because of what Louth calls the “wacko problem” — the possibility that some unbalanced person might try to kill or damage the tree simply because of its fame. Even the most well-meaning visitors would unwittingly but inevitably harm the pine simply by standing close to it, since the weight and wear of hundreds of feet would compact and erode the soil around its roots.

   Louth has spent the last 10 years as guardian of these ancient sentinels, and he was initially cool to the idea of strangers coming to snip off pieces of the Methuselah Tree. Eventually he warmed to the team members, and led them out along the winding mountain trail to the steep canyon where the oldest bristlecones grow, pointing out the most tenacious examples to them.

   They’re strange-looking trees, and the older they get the stranger they look. Stark, weathered and stained with age, their tops broken off, their roots often twisted into bizarre shapes, they stand apart even from each other. Many seem almost dead, with only a few green branches still producing needles and cones.

   In spite of its remote location, the Methuselah Tree isn’t the most inaccessible tree Jared Milarch has sampled for the Champion Tree Project.

   “The toughest one so far was the champion quaking aspen, up in northern Montana, almost to British Columbia,” he said. “There was no path, no visitor’s center. We took a bear dog along because of grizzlies and it took us two days to get in and out. This should be a lot easier.”

   The Methuselah Tree isn’t one of the largest or most impressive bristlecone in the grove; in fact, it’s not even particularly easy to spot. Once Milarch and his assistants reached the ancient pine, they went quickly to work under Louth’s watchful eye, taking a half-dozen cuttings from the tips of the green branches and collecting pine cones. (Although the seeds in the cones only contain half the original DNA from their parent tree, they’ll be used as a backup if the cloning effort fails.)

   Then, like hospital technicians whisking a donated organ off to a waiting recipient, the team hurried back to the trailhead to pack the cuttings and cones in ice chests for shipment to the nurseries and laboratories where the actual cloning will take place. The delicate tissue-culture propagation work will be done at the University of California at Davis, while other clippings are being prepared for a newly developed process called “needle fascicle propagation” at a private laboratory near Monterey.

   “Did you see the new growth at the ends of those cuttings?” Milarch asked excitedly. “That looked good. They were very dense.”

   While Milarch and his team were at the Methuselah Tree, Terry Mock was at the other end of the mountain taking cuttings from a less famous bristlecone known as the Patriarch. A mere baby at some 1,500 years, the Patriarch has a trunk more than 35 feet in circumference and is a good deal taller than its celebrated companion.

   Disaster almost struck when Mock’s rented Suburban blew a tire on the way back to their rendezvous. The sampling team missed the last Federal Express pickup from Bishop, but an Associated Press photographer from San Francisco saved the day by agreeing to drive the samples to the waiting researchers.

   Other cuttings were sent to nurseries in Maryland and Florida, where more conventional grafting techniques will be used to propagate the pines. The Milarchs will know sometime within two to three months whether the attempt to clone the tree is successful.

   “We’re spreading it out among as many places and as many methods as we can,” said David Milarch. “That’s what we do with the tough ones. That’s why we have a 90 percent success rate on all our trees.”

   Coming Monday: The story behind tree cloning


Members of the Champion Tree Project team head back, samples in hand.


A landscape of twisted vegetation and arid mountains stretches eastward to Nevada.


Above and below: Clippers in hand, 23-year-old Jared Milarch carefully removes several growing tips from the branch of the Methuselah Tree. The U.S. Forest Service gave his team permission to take six samples from the ancient bristlecone.


The White Mountains rise steeply from the floor of the Owens Valley of eastern California. Their arid, sun-baked canyons are home to the oldest known trees on Earth, the bristlecone pines.

Of ancient trees and significant sacrifices

   Schulman was a dendrochronologist, a scientist whose main interest was in using the growth rings of elderly or dead trees to learn about ancient climate patterns and to assign more accurate dates to historical artifacts. Since trees produce a new layer of wood each year — thicker layers in wet years and thin layers during drought — the pattern of rings in a tree can provide a written record of the past.

   Searching in the mountains of Idaho for specimens of limber pine that were believed to be extremely long-lived, Schulman heard stories that there were extremely old bristlecone pines growing in the White Mountains of eastern California and took a trip to check the rumors out. To his amazement, his core samples revealed trees that were at least 4,000 years old.

   Returning year after year to what is now officially called the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, Schulman continued taking samples and gathering deadwood from the ground, gradually helping to assemble a continuous tree-ring record that overturned archeological assumptions around the world. For instance, certain wooden artifacts in Europe were discovered to be at least 1,000 years older than previously thought.

   On one of his return trips, in 1957, Schulman discovered a bristlecone with growth rings that extended back more than 4,700 years. He named it “Methuselah,” and it is still recognized as the world’s oldest living tree. His results were announced in a 1958 article in National Geographic magazine, but he died — at the age of 49 — just before the issue containing his story was published.

   There was at least one tree known to have been older than the Methuselah Tree, and the story of its loss is one that modern-day foresters tell with regret and some remorse.

   Several years after Schulman’s death, one of his students was doing research on a nearby mountain in Nevada and got his tree-boring drill caught in a particularly tough tree. Since the tool was an expensive one he asked for permission to cut the tree down to remove it, and forest officials granted his request. Only later, when its rings were counted, did they learn that the tree was at least 4,800 years old.

   Today that pine is known as the Martyr Tree, because the uproar and recrimination that resulted from its destruction caused the federal government to set hundreds of thousands of acres of forest aside as protected habitat for the trees.