MERRY CHRISTMAS
This is a time of giving thanks and I want to thank you for engaging with my photography this year. Your comments keep me going and help shape my look on the world.
This image was made during a visit to the Bristlecone Pine Forest in California’s White Mountains in Inyo County. To walk through these trees is an other-world experience as many of them are thousands of years old. This ancient specimen started growing more than 2,800 years before the birth of Christ and is having a lovely life in the thin air at 11,000 ft. elevation.
“The Methuselah Grove, in which this tree lives, is the location of the "Methuselah", a Great Basin bristlecone pine that is 4,850 years old. For many years, it was considered the world's oldest known living non-clonal organism, until superseded by the discovery in 2013 of another bristlecone pine in the same area with an age of 5,068 years (germination in 3051 BC)."Methuselah" is not marked in the forest, to ensure added protection from vandals.”
May this story of longevity inspire you in 2019.
Thank you Wikipedia for the third paragraph.