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JACKSON, Wyoming—When Jared Friedman took a core sample of an incredibly gnarled, spindly and not-very-tall whitebark pine in Paintbrush Canyon, it did not occur to him that the tree might be ancient. It was less than 30 feet tall. Friedman, a doctoral student in forest ecology at the University of Wyoming, was in Grand Teton National Park studying what kills whitebark pines. He takes core samples of every dead tree he encounters. He dated the unsuspecting tree at 1,289 years old, making it the oldest recorded whitebark pine tree on record. The tree eclipsed the previous record-holding whitebark from Idaho’s Sawtooth Range by 22 years. …He dated the tree to have died in 2021, killed by mountain pine beetles, a native insect that is wreaking havoc on whitebark as its population grows and expands due to climate change.