Cedar Breaks National Monument holds a bristlecone pine that Utah's register of big trees lists as a state champion: 8.3 metres round and only 32 feet tall, on the rim more than 10,000 feet up. It grows beside the Spectra Point trail, where the National Park Service says some bristlecones are more than 1,500 years old and trail guides point to one of 1,600. Nobody has published a ring count for this trunk, so its exact age stays open, and the road in closes for the winter.
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Great Basin Bristlecone Pine (Pinus longaeva) · 1,500 years · Spectra Point
Utah's register of big trees lists this bristlecone pine as a state champion: 325 inches round, about 8.3 metres, and only 32 feet tall when it was measured in 2018. It grows on the rim of Cedar Breaks, more than 10,000 feet up, beside the trail to Spectra Point.
How old it is depends on whom you ask. The National Park Service says some trees in the bristlecone grove at Spectra Point are more than 1,500 years old. Trail guides go further and name a 1,600-year-old bristlecone at the point, and one blog says 1,700. Whether those figures mean this trunk, nobody has said in writing, and nobody has published a ring count for it, so read its age as somewhere past 1,500 years.
Even the low end is a long time for anything alive on an exposed rim. The register's other numbers say what that life looks like: a crown about 29 feet across on a tree barely taller than a house, nearly all of its growth gone into the trunk.
It stands beside the Spectra Point trail, about a mile along the rim from the visitor center. The monument charges an entrance fee, and Utah 148, the road through it, closes to cars for winter snow, on average from mid-November to mid-May. If you know of a ring count or a better age for this tree, tell us.
Photo: The Dye Clan (CC BY-SA 3.0)