While shooting a book on the American badlands by moonlight, at the height of the golden age of color film photography, I ran across the bristlecone Pine for the first time, in Bryce Canyon and Cedar Breaks, where the badlands go very high in eevation, even above the tree line.
The most timeless living things on the surface of the earth are pinus longaeva, the bristlecone pine.
The tree grows in dolomite, in an alkaline existence, with only .25 millimeter of growth per year. Another hardy plant, lichen, grows one centimeter a century.
Survival by reclusion is it’s mode of survival, but it’s much deeper than that because most of the tree can actually be dead, while the tree is considered alive. Is it living or dying while standing? The tree is taught itself self sacrifice, allowing sections of itself to die, conservatively while standing. Such living things, “thrives” conservatively in harsh conditions.
I first encountered them while in certain high elevation badlands that I had come across while doing a book depicting all of the American Badlands. While in Cedar breaks for instants I was very surprised to run into the press account, as well as, in Bryce Canyon during, yet, another Moonlight run of landscape photography. And someways it made sense the Badlands were about as dry and isolated as you could get and if there were a tree that loved isolation but wanted it above the tree line, then ancient the ancient pines would find a home. Although the White Mountains preserve has very little vegetation and, for all intents, is a bad land itself, it is unlike the traditional American badlands, in the sense that the landscape is essentially just bear with none of the photos or fancy erosion of the traditional badlands. Isolation as a survival strategy, you can’t beat it.
These shots are from three different sites – Bryce Canyon, Cedar Breaks and the White Mountains. While doing a book on the American badlands by moonlight, i would also try to capture nearby or bristlecone pines in the badlands areas themselves, finally deciding a trip to the greatest concentration of these trees, in California, was worth the effort.
The White Mountains, by far, comprise most of the shots that are put out here. This is because the White Mountains in California have the greatest collection of bristlecone Pine in the world. For a tree that lives socially distant in space, and is rare, you can find, literally, groves of bristlecone pine, spread out into different locations, one is at 9600 feet, the Schulman Grove, and the other, Patriarch Grove, is around 11,000 feet further and higher up into the mountains. The White Mountains are west of and directly behind the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada, in the highest portion of the Sierra Nevada’s range, so that summer rain is scarce, and most precipitation falls as winter snow. The mean precipitation is 12 inches per year, with 2.5 inches being rainfall during a short growing season.
You would think that the harsher the conditions, and with less water, the least bristlecone you would see, just like any plant or living thing. In fact, the white mountain groves receives half the precipitation that the Great Basin bristlecone locations receives.
They call it pinus longaeva for a reason, and the one hour long time exposures by moonlight, seems pretty timely. but bear in mind, the tree could be doomed. Already, since 2014, the southern bristlecone on Telescope Peak in Death Valley, the majority of the pines in the groves are dead. After all these years – thousands – the tree has met its match and is being overpowered by unusual weather conditions.
VIEW the slideshow.
