Prometheus fell before anyone knew its age
Illustration by Domi Verse X
A scruffy pine in Nevada was cut up in 1964, and only afterwards did anyone count what was inside it.
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High on Wheeler Peak in eastern Nevada, a graduate student named Donald Currey spent the summer of 1964 studying old ice-age glaciers and past climate. He was not hunting for record trees. Tree rings were simply his notebook. One twisted bristlecone pine on that slope carried the plain label WPN-114. People later called it Prometheus.
In August that year, a US Forest Service crew cut it down with a chainsaw.
Why it was cut is still argued about
The famous version says Currey's ring-sampling drill jammed in the trunk, so the tree was felled to get it back. That is one account, not a settled fact. The National Park Service, which manages the site today, says there are several accounts and lists a broken borer, a borer too short for the enormous trunk, and Currey wanting a full slice instead of a thin core. It also states plainly that Currey had Forest Service permission to have the tree cut.
In an essay by scholar Michael Cohen, a Forest Service man recalled Currey having extreme difficulty getting usable cores and asking for a whole section, while a supervisor waved the job through. Cohen also records that one sawyer refused the work the day before. The Park Service's own conclusion is blunt: we may never know the true story.
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The number kept moving
Currey published a count of 4,844 rings. Donald Graybill at Arizona's tree-ring lab later counted 4,862. Neither number is the tree's age. Rings counted at one height miss the years before the trunk grew that tall, and in bad years a bristlecone may add no ring at all. Counting them is patient work under magnification, and a pocket microscope will show you the same bands in a slice of firewood. The tree-ring database OLDLIST now lists Prometheus at about 4,900 years, from a 2018 redating. That means it sprouted more than 300 years before anyone started building the Great Pyramid, roughly 4,500 years ago.
Now the old ones keep their addresses
Methuselah, in California's White Mountains, is listed by OLDLIST at around 4,850 years, and the Forest Service does not publish where it stands). Even the title of oldest is unsettled: a tree once claimed at over 5,000 years was dropped from OLDLIST because the core used to date it cannot be found in the lab. You can grow the species yourself from a bristlecone pine seed kit, though you will not be around for the interesting part.
Somewhere on a dry ridge, an older one may already be counted and unnamed. Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees is a good place to go next if trees on this timescale interest you.
