She's old.

Old enough that a good guess of her age would have to be calibrated not in years, not in decades, but in centuries.

And she's technically not even a "she."

She's monoecious, meaning she has both male and female sex organs.

Like all limber pines.

But this plant produces seeds, some of which I have in my pocket now, so it is a she to me.

The heeler sisters and I visited this old pine this morning, as we passed by on our route. This is the largest Pinus flexilis that I have run across, but I suppose there may be others as great.

She's growing on top of a ridge in the Haystack Mountains, which would actually be considered low foothills in many places. They're steep and rocky, and covered with our desert steppe vegetation of sagebrush, saltbush and greasewood.

But everywhere the limestone beds are exposed, the vegetation changes. We get mountainmahogany (No, that isn't a typo. Unlike the rest of the world, we biologists run those two words together.), bitterbrush, junipers and limber pines. Little slivers of mountain habitat in the middle of arid desert.

The tree is growing in a crack in the limestone, but the crack is long gone, buried by wood. I measured her circumference at ground level:

7.6 meters.

That's 21 feet folks.

Trees grow slow in our cold, dry climate. You can wrap your two hands around the trunk of most limber pines. This tree is huge!

Her trunk splits almost immediately above the rock, with the large northeast branch heading out almost horizontal (the heeler sisters were able to run up it after me...yes, I still climb trees), so the trunk is a flattened ellipse rather than a circle.

Foresters like to compare trees using "dbh," the diameter breast high. (That ought to be good for a google hit or two.) The circumference of her main trunk at breast height is 3.2 meters, so her approximate dbh is 1.0 meters, or roughly 39 inches.

My dendrology textbook mentions this species normally maxes out at 24" dbh.

Her roots have lifted several slabs of limestone, the greatest being almost three meters long and a half meter thick.

Her main trunk is broken off about three meters up, with several large branches taking off from there, a couple almost level. The southeast side of the trunk is dead, grey wood streaked with oranges and black. Flickers have pecked almost a dozen holes in this side, but all are filled with debris.

From a distance, the tree isn't that remarkable, probably only 10 meters high or so. I counted 11 other pines on this outcrop, along with two large junipers, and a couple are taller than the old tree. The second largest has a single trunk that is 3 meters around.

She is near the edge of the limestone outcrop, with cliffs and a wide valley to the south. Great view.

And I'm not the only one who thinks so. Nor are the heelers and I the only ones who climb her. Quite a view scat piles around the base, and a few up on the flat branches.

Mountain lion scat.

One pretty fresh.

The northeast branch fans out about three meters above the ground, making a wonderful perch. Likewise for a southeast branch coming off the main trunk almost five meters up. Scat up there, too.

I'm not the only human to visit this tree. A couple lower, dead branches have been sawn off. By hand, not chain saw. For fenceposts, long ago? Or firewood for a sheep herder?

I have discussed the spark that exists in animals, which some would call a soul. I am uncertain about plant life having that spark.

But I do not feel alone when I am with this tree.

The wife recently bought herself a bonsai tree for her office. I have always wanted a bonsai tree, but even when young I knew they were a responsibility I was unwilling to keep. So I never tried to grow one.

If ever I have a bonsai, I want it to be an offsping of this tree.

Hence the eight seeds in my pocket, scoured from dozens of cones.

(The heeler sisters got tired of me behaving like a squirrel and retreated to the truck.)

And hence the chunk of limestone in the truck.