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Show About the Cover "Bristlecone pine World's oldest old-est tree." That is the explanation of the picture which graces the front cover cov-er of "Iron County . . . Color Country." Coun-try." This particular Bristlecone pine is located near Cedar Breaks National Na-tional Monument. According to Edmund Schulman and W. Robert Moore in an article, "Bristlecone Pine Oldest Known Living Thing" in National Geographic Geogra-phic Magazine in March 1958, the following information is known about the bristlecone pine. The bristlecone pines grow in arid highlands. The range is from Colorado to California. The bristlecone bristle-cone pines are really living ruins. Their trunks are 10 to 20 feet high and one has a circumference of 37 feet. They look like eroded stumps. Each possesses a life line, a few inches wide, or bark-covered growing grow-ing tissue which leads from the roots to the branches. They grow sparingly, adding no more than an inch of girth in a century. During lean years the bristlecone does not produce cones or rings except on a narrow strip of stem. The oldest bristlecones grow exceedingly slow from the very first, and the sound ones are extremely resinous. Utah has two trees considered old. One is an 860 year old ponder-osa ponder-osa pine in Bryce Canyon National Park and the other a 975 year old pinon pine in central Utah. A borer is used to cut an unbroken unbrok-en core from the heart of a tree and then the core is studied to determine deter-mine age and climatic conditions. The boring instrument leaves no permanent damage to the tree. The bristlecone pine's age was discovered through a study made for climatic conditions. Tree rings of certain species show marked variations var-iations in ring width for wet and dry years. The bristlecone pines are particularly accurate, but Rocky Mountain Douglas fir and other pines also provide information, but not for such long periods. The bristlecone bris-tlecone has presented some problems prob-lems in ring counting, but through use of special instruments and overlapping over-lapping of rings the work can now be done accurately. |