Ancient limber pine, likely Oregon's oldest living tree, draws twin brothers to Wallowas quest (photo essay, video)

Terry Richard | By Terry Richard | The Oregonian
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on September 24, 2012 at 4:54 PM, updated May 10, 2014 at 8:00 AM

One of the most remote of the Wallowa peaks, Cusick Mountain is an alien place where extrusions of dark brown basalt clash with an otherwise stark landscape of white granite and limestone.

The place exudes mystique, making it an ideal setting for a quest.

Hardly anything of size grows on the mountain's upper 1,500 feet, though something of significance does live there. The fractured limestone provides a rare Oregon home for limber pine, a tree species more typical of storm-battered ridges high in the Great Basin and Rocky Mountains.

This mountain in the northeast corner of the state, a dozen miles from any road, is home to an extraordinary specimen of this pine.

No one knows the age of the ancient living tree on Cusick Mountain because a rotten core has stymied attempts to count growth rings. A life-preserving outer ring of bark, with scales and curves like a snake, coils upward from the roots to nourish a healthy crown.

The few intrepid explorers who have seen its gnarled shape have little trouble believing the tree to be in the 1,600- to 2,000-year range. Not ancient compared with bristlecone pines of California and Nevada, which reach 4,800 years, but still as old as any known living thing in Oregon that sprouted from a seed.

Twin brothers Darryl and Darvel Lloyd, who ran a mountain climbing guide service on Mount Adams out of the Flying L Ranch in Washington, learned of the tree two years ago and resolved to journey to it.

You may think lifelong hikers and backpackers who have covered much of Oregon and Washington and who have an affinity for both mountains and trees, like the brothers have, would have known of the tree earlier. But though the limber pine was discovered in 1998 by Gary Dielman of Baker City, it was shrouded in obscurity until an "Oregon Field Guide" segment in 2010.

Because Oregon's old limber pine grows on a stark mountainside at 8,000 feet above sea level, the Lloyds knew time was short if they ever hoped to see the tree. Facing their own age milestone when they turn 70 late this year, the Lloyd brothers set off on a five-day journey in late August to visit the venerable tree.


Ancient limber pine on remote Oregon mountain leads to epic adventure for twin brothers Twins Darvel and Darryl Lloyd (Portland and Hood River), 69 years old, grew up in the shadow of Mount Adams. By the age of ten, they had climbed their backyard mountain, and they haven't stopped exploring the Northwest since. A few weeks ago they made a 35-mile backpack trip to the Wallowas in northeast Oregon to see a rare, stately old tree (possibly the oldest living tree in the state), a limberpine high on Cusick Mountain.
Destined to love trees

Born in 1942 in Longview, Wash., the Lloyd twins came by their love of trees as young children from their father, a self-employed commercial forest consultant who documented one of the world's largest Douglas firs in 1938. Les Lloyd and his wife, Ilse, took their sons and a daughter to visit the 151/2-foot thick behemoth in Oregon's Clatsop County frequently, until it crashed to the ground after the 1962 Columbus Day storm.

The Lloyds settled on 80 forested acres near Mount Adams, where they built the Flying L guest ranch at Glenwood. The family maintained ownership until 1997.

The twins spent two years of their youth in Taiwan, where their father worked to protect the magnificent Formosan cypress, an exceedingly large and long-living conifer.

Darryl, who studied shipping at the University of Rhode Island, worked as a merchant marine, ran the Mount Adams guide service and later started Long Shadow Photography in Hood River. Darvel, 20 minutes the younger, taught geography, which he'd studied at Oregon State University, as well as outdoor education. Living in Canada and Colorado, he eventually settled back in Portland.

Both married but had no children. As they aged and their careers slowed down, they found more time to travel together. Not surprisingly, they were interested in the same thing: the Western landscape, Darryl as a photographer and Darvel as a geologist.

Their common interest in trees drew them in recent years to the oldest bristlecone pines, the giant sequoias and redwoods, and largest Western red cedars and Sitka spruces.

After they visited the Doerner Fir, the largest and tallest tree in Oregon, Darryl made a 10-foot tall photograph of it. While researching their visit to the famed Coos County Douglas fir, they learned more about Oregon's ancient limber pine.

Figuring out an approach

The brothers toyed with several itineraries but decide to start from Summit Point in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest because of its high elevation (6,450 feet) and a campsite near Crater Lake that would divide the 13-mile approach into equal halves. They plan two days to walk in, one day to climb Cusick Mountain and find the tree, then two days to hike out.

They trained all summer with day hikes, including an outing to Washington's North Cascades. Their Wallowas journey was beyond their normal bounds: Neither had climbed a summit since 2003, and these days they do overnight backpack trips only to reach special places.

Like where the ancient limber pine lives on Cusick Mountain.

On the second day of their quest, after hopping across the South Fork of the Imnaha River, they stop to take out the map, photos and binoculars and look for the tree. Within a minute Darvel recognizes it from afar fromthe photos on the Internet, photos that have been burned into their brains.

By 7 a.m. on Day 3, they are heading up the mountain's southeast ridge.

It takes a 3,100-foot climb, with no trail, to reach the 9,518-foot summit. After tagging the top and soaking in the view of the Wallowa range, they descend the same route while looking for the tree's signature crown.

The climb has been anything but uneventful. Darryl slips in one of the many rock-choked gullies, sliding backward 10 feet. Darvel leaves a glove at the first rest break. Darryl's $600 glasses slip from his belt, but the case is recovered before it tumbles beyond reach. Darvel drops his camera, but Darryl trails behind and notices.

It's a Keystone Cops routine (Darryl jokingly blamed it on the lead paint he had to scrape off the ranch fence as a teenager), but their stubbornness prevails.

Upon descending to 8,200 feet, Darvel uses binoculars to find the ancient limber pine. To reach it they drop 200 feet off the ridge, over fractured loose limestone.

"The photos of it don't do it justice," Darvel says later. "Even though most of it is dead, it's beautifully gnarled and weathered --the texture, the bleached-out wood, all the beautiful patterns from hundreds and thousands of years of weathering."

He finds the age of the tree inspiring, especially considering its hardscrabble life at timberline.

"It's just hard for me to believe that (trees like this) could live that long, especially through giant storms and wildfires and landslides and avalanches and everything else," Darvel says. He has seen many limber pines in their more usual habitat in Colorado but none like this.

Other than its trunk, the tree is not exceptionally large, but its diameter of nearly 7 feet and its height of 30 feet makes it the third largest of its species.

The slope beneath the tree is even steeper than where it lives. An unwary visitor who slips would become a cloud of dust sliding down the mountain, so the Lloyds ruefully regain the ground they had lost, back up through the shattered limestone. They return to camp at 5 p.m., get a good night's sleep, then begin the two-day march out.

Within weeks they are back in the woods looking for more big trees, this time on British Columbia's Vancouver Island. They are also there to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the death of their father, who was lost in 1972 while paddling an outrigger canoe in the Inside Passage.

The canoe had been made from a tree.

TR.CusickMtnnorthside.JPGView full sizeCusick Mountain's north side in 2011.
The ancient limber pine

Discovery: Gary Dielman  of Baker City accidently discovered what may be Oregon's oldest tree in 1998 while looking for a shortcut down Cusick Mountain in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest of northeast Oregon. He led several tree experts and an OPB film team to the site. (See separate story.)

Size: The tree is 80.9 inches in diameter, 30 1/2 feet tall, with a 27-foot average crown spread. That gives it 292 points, third among the world's limber pines (one in Utah has 349 points, another in Colorado 295).

Age: The scientist who drilled a core sample in the outer 10 inches of the trunk traced growth to the year 1141. The other 30 inches (to complete half the diameter) were rotten. If 10 inches equals 900 years, do 30 more inches increase the age to 3,600 years? Most likely not, because outer tree rings are closer together as a tree grows. The oldest known limber pine, in Colorado, is 1,661 years old.

Location: The tree lives at 8,000 feet on the southeast slope of Cusick Mountain. The Lloyds found it by watching a 2010 "Oregon Field Guide" program and reading about it on  

-- Terry Richard