Prometheus Found

On the summer solstice of 2023, I was standing on a mountain in a remote corner of Nevada and tearing up while I shoveled snow. The alpine air was crisp, the sky blue. All around me stood ancient bristlecone pines, their gnarled branches reaching upward as if electrified. With each shovel of snow, my heart beat hard as I slowly excavated the most beautiful object I had ever seen: a tree stump.

Once I removed compacted snow and ice, I took out a paintbrush and carefully dusted the tree’s remains, revealing rings created long ago. These rings were layers of xylem that started forming before the Great Pyramids were built. They belonged to what was once one of the oldest living things on Earth — or maybe the oldest. I gazed at this stump that had been haunting my dreams, realizing how few people had ever seen the tree, dead or alive.

I’d first learned of the existence of this tree a few months prior on a date. “Have you heard of Prometheus?” asked Caroline, a California-based artist, as we sipped coffee. We had matched on a dating app while she was passing through my hometown of Denver on her way back to the West Coast, and she seemed too interesting not to meet. Caroline has a unique practice of making molds of objects in nature, such as pieces of ice from the Arctic, and re-creating them in glass form. When Caroline showed me her art, it had a full-body effect on me. She wanted to work on Prometheus next — but the answer to her question was no, I had no idea what she was talking about.

She went on to tell the story of this ancient tree and its demise. In 1964, a University of North Carolina graduate student named Donald Currey went to Nevada in search of Great Basin bristlecone pines. Living high in the mountains of just three Western states, the trees recently had been discovered to be the longest-living individual organisms on the planet. (The specimen currently holding the title of oldest is a bristlecone in California’s White Mountains.) Currey, who planned to study the climate of the Little Ice Age using tree rings, knew bristlecones would be the perfect species for his project. He hiked several thousand feet up Wheeler Peak in what is now Great Basin National Park, while bushwhacking through pine scrub and scree fields, and found a tree he described as looking very old. After placing the bit of a coring tool against the trunk, he twisted, but there was a problem. “The normal approach to coring the tree wasn’t working,” said the late Currey in a 2001 NOVA documentary, one of the rare records (and possibly the only one) of him talking about this expedition. The tree was so large that the tool wasn’t effective. So he lumbered back down the mountain and told the district ranger from the U.S. Forest Service about the problem. Their solution? Cut down the tree.

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Currey brought a slab from the lower part of the tree back to his lab and started counting the rings. Soon, he’d counted back 1,000 years to the Vikings, then back to the time of the Roman Empire and gladiators. But he was only halfway finished. In the end, the pine’s cross section had 4,844 annual rings. At that point, the oldest known organism was several decades younger (a bristlecone pine in California named Methuselah).

Hoping he’d miscounted, Currey began the tedious process again. But no matter how many times he counted the rings, the number never decreased. In other words, he had discovered the oldest tree ever dated. But he had killed it.

Beginning in the 1950s, naturalists had given names to several of the largest or most distinctive bristlecone pines. There were Buddha, Socrates, Methuselah and, of course, Prometheus, which had been named by Great Basin native Darwin Lambert. Unsurprisingly, Lambert raged against Prometheus’ ill-fated felling, writing in Audubon magazine: “Earth’s oldest living thing was casually killed (yes murdered!) in the name of science.” The turmoil surrounding the great tree’s death likely also further motivated local advocates and NPCA — Lambert became a board member of the organization in 1958 — which had been pushing for a national park protecting the bristlecones. Their efforts finally paid off in 1986 when Congress established Great Basin National Park.

“When I first heard of the story of Prometheus, I was instantly interested — in the story but also how few people knew about it,” Caroline said as she wrapped up her retelling. “I’m thinking of going out there this summer and hiking around in hopes of finding it.” (Apparently, after the initial outcry died down, the handful of people who knew the stump’s location kept it under wraps to help protect it from vandals.)

Date over, we parted ways. But as the weeks passed, I found I couldn’t get Caroline — or that stump — off my mind. Before then, I barely noticed the trees around me. Something about Prometheus, though, piqued my curiosity. And truthfully, I wanted another way to connect with Caroline. So I decided to find the remains of the tree.

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I spent months searching the deepest corners of the internet and talking to people across the country to pinpoint its location. As an entomologist, I find comfort in research. The world of trees, however, was utterly new to me. I dug up academic papers and topographic maps; I plotted and triangulated; I lost myself in obscure social media threads. Eventually, I realized that the tree had lived right at the 10,000-foot tree line and had been given an identification number in Currey’s records. During those months, Caroline and I continued getting to know each other from afar, discussing all non-stump-related topics under the moon, but she didn’t know I was searching behind the scenes. One day, I asked her, “Are you still trying to find Prometheus this summer? Because I think I know how to get there.” I offered to give her the coordinates, but she said we should go together.

We met halfway between our homes in Baker, Nevada. (It turned out to be precisely halfway, with each of our drives taking 9 hours and 33 minutes.) Though it was June, the park road to Wheeler Peak had reopened only days before, owing to a long winter. On the first day of our expedition, we hiked for hours through deep snow as backcountry skiers swished past us. In time, we lost our way, thwarted by an impending storm and a trail that disappeared or petered out in snow and scree fields. But our attempt on the second day went flawlessly. We made our way up to a pine stand on a ridge of the 13,000-foot Wheeler Peak. Caroline and I split up to slowly walk down the ridge and through the trees in search of Prometheus. Due to the snow, we knew the stump would be covered. So, rather than scouring for Prometheus itself, I was on the hunt for its grove, which I’d seen in historic photos. After about 20 minutes, I found myself in a clearing of untouched snow and spotted a piece of wood sticking out that a chainsaw had clearly sliced. The surrounding trees were recognizable to me, having been burned into my memory. I knew this had to be it.

We dug for hours, only partially excavating the massive, pool table-sized stump. After chiseling away layers of ice, we moved to shifting snow with our hands for fear of damaging the bark, then used a paintbrush to reveal the finer details. Prometheus’ smooth rings and twisted bark were somehow familiar. Caroline and I looked at each other with a sense of wonder. The stump felt like a holy relic. Rather than risk harming it by casting a physical mold, Caroline used her phone to take a three-dimensional scan of a piece of the tree we found next to the stump. The wood of bristlecone pines is dense and can withstand extreme elements over thousands of years, which worked in our favor: This chunk looked as if it had been chopped the day before.

When you look at the rings of ancient trees, they give you perspective. You see a world with no borders, only time. Gazing at Prometheus’ rings reminded me that everything we have lived through is living in us and that we can constantly grow without losing who we’ve been.

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We shared a glorious afternoon in that clearing with Prometheus. Caroline spent the time meticulously documenting the stump’s features and making sure her scans were sufficiently detailed. Meanwhile, I photographed her process and made a rubbing of the stump’s rings. When we convinced ourselves we had had our fill (could we ever?), Caroline and I picked up our backpacks, shovel and ice ax. We started back down the snowy mountainside, looking back just once for a final glimpse of that felled pine. As we returned to the trailhead, park rangers closed the trail behind us due to flooding from snowmelt.

Today, 60 years after the tree’s death, a piece of Prometheus lives on in glass form. Caroline, who said she wanted to give the sculpture “the energy it deserves,” spent seven months turning those hard-won 3-D scans into an art piece. Imperfect in shape and lined with age, the blocky sculpture immortalizes that ancient tree and serves as a reminder of the shortsightedness of humans.

As for Caroline and me? After a romantic summer chasing adventure in the Sierras, we have settled into a friendship. But our artistic partnership has continued. We are collaborating on other projects to preserve natural archives in glass, including ancient stumps and ice in California and Alaska. These objects have recorded and preserved time on Earth through their layers, and we aim to capture their signatures before they weather and melt forever.

Images of Caroline Landau’s Prometheus piece can be seen at carolinelandau.com and on Instagram @carolinelandau.