My photostream is dedicated to photos of ancient Great Basin Bristlecone Pine (Pinus longaeva) growing at ten to over eleven thousand feet (3353m) elevation in Great Basin National Park, Nevada USA.

At such elevation, these trees can live for over five thousand years, and can remain standing for another two to three thousand years after they die.

They are the oldest living individual trees on Earth; each a perfect and unique expression of the precise micro-environment in which it exists.

I am a mere 82 years old, and have recently rediscovered photography. My photos, essays, poetry, and responses to comments are meant as meditations on the journey of these trees as well as that of my own - and how those journeys often intersect in unexpected and surprising ways.

I appreciate your interest and - in their own inscrutable way - I am certain the trees do also...

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- -'Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time...Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.'

Norman Maclean

A River Runs Through It (1976)

- - ‘Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.’

Thomas Huxley (1860)

Step into the silence

Take it in your own two hands

And scatter it like diamonds

All across these lands

David Grey

'White Album' (1998)