1950s: The Atomic Energy Commission exploded 188 atomic bombs at the
Nevada Test Site. Edmund Schulman of the University of Arizona's Laboratory
of Tree Ring Research witnessed many of the predawn, aboveground blasts from
the top of the White Mountains, where he bored into a bristlecone pine 4,600
years old. If one were to inscribe events from the history of the State of
Nevada upon the rings of the slab, they would be marked in the last 2 percent
of the tree's rings. The Atomic Age would barely register, so far. The Forest
Service designated a protected reserve for bristlecones in the White Mountains
and the National Park Service proposed to expand Lehman Caves National Monument
in a park that would embrace the bristlecones on Wheeler Peak.
1960s: Willard Libby won the Nobel Prize for inventing the radiocarbon dating method of determining the age of organic matter by measuring the proportion of Carbon 14, a naturally occurring unstable isotope. While studying packrat middens at the Nevada Test Site, researchers discovered bristlecone fragments where none of the trees grew at that time. Downwind on Wheeler Peak, Donald Currey, a researcher studying climate change, cut down a 5,000 year old bristlecone, the oldest tree ever found.
1970s: Wes Ferguson. a student of Schulman's, used living and dead bristlecones to correct a flaw in Libby's radiocarbon dating method. The tree rings provided reliable calibration of radiocarbon indices of dates to the exact year. This caused a revolution in archaeology, and along with the discovery of bristlecones in packrat middens, changed scientific views of the history of the Great Basin, where 10,000 years ago, during much wetter climes, bristlecones grew in an open woodland that stretched across central Nevada. The Energy Department proposed building a high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain on the Nevada Test Site.
1980s: The Air Force proposed a network of railroads through the
valleys surrounding Wheeler Peak to carry nuclear missiles in an elaborate
shell game called the MX. Great Basin National Park was established. Congress
directed the Energy Department to study Yucca Mountain as the only site
for storing the nation's most dangerous nuclear waste.
1990s? Nuclear testing has been halted. Great Basin National Park's management plan aims to preserve bristlecones that will grow on Wheeler Peak for thousands of years. At Yucca Mountain, the Energy Department is trying to prove it can store nuclear waste safely in the Great Basin for 10,000 years. The bristlecone trees that are alive today may not outlive the legacy of the Atomic Age, but we can use them to measure our time and gain some perspective on the legacy we leave here.