How One Researcher Accidentally Killed One of the Oldest Trees in the World

In the summer of 1964, a graduate student named Donald Rusk Currey asked for permission to cut down a tree growing on a Nevada mountainside.

Why did the young researcher make such a request? There are “several accounts” of the circumstances, according to Great Basin National Park. In one version of the story, Currey needed to fell the tree to retrieve his drill, which had gotten stuck when he tried to take a core sample. In another version, he determined that he needed a full cross-section to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the tree’s rings.

“We may never know the true story of what happened,” writes the park. “But we do know one thing for certain: Currey had permission from the Forest Service to have the tree cut down.”

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Now known as Prometheus, the doomed tree was a Great Basin bristlecone pine located on Wheeler Peak in eastern Nevada. When the deed was done, Currey brought a sample back to his hotel room. Armed with a powerful magnifying glass, he spent a week counting rings.

“I knew it was a pretty old tree,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle’s Carl T. Hall in 1998. However, he didn’t know how old, and he had assumed there were older trees growing nearby.

Eventually, he determined that the tree he had just killed dated back almost 5,000 years—one of the oldest trees ever recorded.

Great Basin bristlecone pines are some of the longest-living trees in the world. That fact can be surprising to those who incorrectly assume that a tree’s life span is always correlated with its size. Bristlecone pines max out at around 20 feet tall—they’re gnarly, little gnomes of trees, nothing like the majestic redwoods of California. They grow very slowly, and they’re equipped to survive in harsh environments. Even after sustaining extensive damage, surviving branches are still able to thrive.

“Bristlecones will grow 1,000 years or so, and then the bark will start dying off on one side,” Tom Harlan, a researcher at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, told Collectors Weekly’s Hunter Oatman-Stanford in 2012. “Therefore, the tree can’t support the branches directly above that area, and they die. Pretty soon you’re left with a small strip of bark, which is supporting all of the foliage. It might be only two inches wide, but the pine is still considered a growing, healthy tree.”

It’s also worth noting that figuring out a tree’s age isn’t so easy. Dendrochronology—the science of tree-ring dating—didn’t come around until the late 1800s. The process is more complicated than just counting rings, as each ring doesn’t necessarily correspond to a year.

“Numerous studies illustrate how ring-counting leads to incorrect conclusions drawn from inaccurate dating,” per the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. “Dendrochronologists demand the assignment of a single calendar year to a single ring. Various techniques are used to cross-date wood samples to assure accurate dating.”

Over the years, many were moved by Currey’s story, which helped herald new ways of thinking about tree conservation. These days, bristlecones on federal lands are protected. A tree as old as Prometheus likely wouldn’t meet the same fate.

“It’s not going to happen again,” Anna Schoettle, an ecophysiologist with the Rocky Mountain Research Station, told Collectors Weekly. “But it wasn’t something that I think they struggled with at the time, because it was just a tree, and the mind-set was that trees were a renewable resource and they would grow back.”

Currey almost certainly didn’t fell the oldest tree in the world. Since the 1960s, researchers have identified trees that may be older than Prometheus, though many of these claims haven’t been verified. Additionally, there are forests in California’s White Mountains, and elsewhere, where trees currently standing are probably far older than his Prometheus tree. We just don’t know about them yet.

Rose Eveleth | | READ MORE

Rose Eveleth was a writer for Smart News and a producer/designer/ science writer/ animator based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Scientific American, Story Collider, TED-Ed and OnEarth.

Ellen Wexler | | READ MORE

Ellen Wexler is Smithsonian magazine’s assistant digital editor, humanities.