Long before the birth of Christ and the fall of the Roman Empire, bristlecone pines were growing in Colorado. Up on Black Mountain, at 11,000 feet, you can find one 2,500-year-old tree that is still alive today.

The bristlecone’s ability to survive thousands of years in thin soil on wind-blown, drought-stricken mountaintops makes it one of the most resilient living things on the planet.

A bristlecone named Methuselah in the White Mountains of eastern California stands at an incredible 4,847 years old.

These are not big, rigid, towering trees, however. Rather, they are pliant, twisting, stubborn creatures that bend and shape themselves to the changes in prevailing winds. They grow slowly to conserve energy, often using the same needles for decades .

I’ve always admired them for standing their ground no matter what, for their suppleness in adapting to changing conditions, their ability to bend with the times, to grow in harmony with the elements rather than against them.

Newspapers, I submit, are not unlike bristlecones.

Last week, in a glittering party at The Broadmoor’s International Center, our company celebrated the 150th birthday of the Colorado Springs Gazette, the oldest continuous business in Colorado Springs, and one that has now sprouted branches in Denver: The Denver Gazette and Colorado Politics.

If you type a G for each year the Gazette has been around, it looks like this:

GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

If newspapers are in their death throes, then why are we celebrating 150 years of one such newspaper surviving, adapting, and thriving?

It’s because reports of the death of newspapers are greatly exaggerated. Newspapers are evolving, not dying. They are finding new forms.

Some scientists theorize similarly that dinosaurs never died out, they just evolved into birds.

Gazette 150: More than just a Colorado Springs newspaper

Newspapers are evolving into birds right now. They are becoming digital newspapers like The Denver Gazette. They are becoming mobile apps and substack newsletters and podcasts and video blogs and all sorts of other new forms.

But the urge to tell stories truthfully, accurately, engagingly and fairly persists. Don’t you believe it when someone tells you otherwise.

The reason newspapers refuse to die is because free speech refuses to die. The First Amendment is first for a reason; it’s the single most important variable in the equation that equals democracy.

PHOTOS: Gazette 150th Celebration

I would argue that there has never been such a hunger for news that newspapers are good at, news that treasures community, news without a slant, news that respects its audience enough to let them decide what the facts mean rather than spoon-feeding them ideologically spun stuff the way cable news and social media sites do.

My prediction: You’re going to see newspapers’ vetted, fact-checked, balanced, community-engaged brand of news rise again in the coming years, as newspapers beat back efforts to keep them from fighting together as one industry, and new laws are implemented that require internet sites to pay for stories they get from newspapers and require them to play by the same rules as newspapers when it comes to libel and fact checking.

At the celebration of the Gazette’s 150-year run, U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn summed up that enduring need for newspapers in a proclamation honoring The Gazette that was read on the floor of Congress and permanently entered into the Congressional Record.

“The Gazette is more than a newspaper,” Lamborn declared. “It is a source of meaningful, well-composed news and information that reaches multiple generations of our community. For decades, The Gazette’s staff and editorial board have told southern Colorado’s stories, shaped public opinion, and given readers something to think about.”

Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers echoed that message of the necessity of newspapers in a keynote address at the party.

“Institutions do not survive for 150 years unless they have an enduring mission, the ability to adapt in carrying out that mission, and the leadership and vision to carry that mission forward,” Suthers said.

“Thank you for your willingness to focus on our future,” he added. “Let us hope that there will be a similar gathering in 2072 to mark The Gazette’s bicentennial. I don’t have any clue what newspapers will look like then. And pretty sure most of us in this room won’t be there. But let’s all work hard to be good ancestors for those who will.”

After the speeches and cocktails and happy congratulations, I wandered around Thursday’s celebration marveling that anything at all can last 150 years in this age of instant gratification, with the rise and fall of internet companies in the blink of an eye, and the new new thing seizing the American imagination every few months.

Gazette Marketing Manager Rudy Vasquez and Marketing Coordinator Kelly Speiker commissioned artist Doug Haug and our own graphics designer Amber Borata to create 8-foot-tall towers of front pages, stories, personalities and photos for the celebration so that people could literally walk through our newspaper’s history of covering history. That whirl of events we’ve lived through over the years as a state and a newspaper and a nation is staggering to see all in one place.

CEO of Gazette’s owner looks at the present and the future

The Gazette was here before Colorado became a state, and bore witness though the gold rush, the Jazz Age and the rise and fall of the Ku Klux Klan; through World War I and World War II and the arrival of Fort Carson, NORAD and the Air Force Academy; through the emergence of the state’s vaunted ski industry and its Olympic dreams and burgeoning tourism economy; through the oil boom and then the tech boom and then the aerospace boom; and the state’s unstoppable explosion in population and prosperity in recent years.

Playwright Arthur Miller once described a good newspaper as a nation talking to itself. A good local newspaper is the same — a city, town or state telling its story to itself. I have to say an immense pride welled up inside me at that party that the company where I work has been a sentinel of this state’s conversation with itself for 15 decades … and still is.

From Out West to The Gazette: a timeline of Colorado Springs’ newspaper

Wandering among those towering towers was like wandering through a forest of everlasting stories that continue on and on, simply adding new chapters and characters as they unfold. It was grandly humbling to be palpably reminded that we are all a part of something very much longer-lasting and larger than ourselves, adding our own small verses to the master tale.

In fact, it was not unlike wandering through a forest of bristlecones.