Bristlecone pines are actually much smaller than this: So the chopping should be pretty easy.
Courtesy purplekeyThe world has finally gotten sick of California’s bristlecone pine Methuselah, and offered up something better.

The bristlecone pines of the White Mountains in California are some of the oldest living objects in the world, with one individual, nicknamed “Methuselah,” having been aged at around 5,000 years. Now five thousand years is older than most people I know, but I don’t think that I’d go around calling those trees “super old” or anything. More along the lines of “kind of old,” and for decades we’ve had to put up with complaints over these kind-of-old trees (e.g. “Don’t cut it down! It’s kind of old!”) Since when has something being kind of old ever stopped us from destroying it?

Well, now Methuselah won’t even be able to play that card anymore, because its kind of old woody butt has been blown out of the water by a new old tree, an 8000-year-old Norway spruce, found, ironically, in Sweden. 8000 years—I think we can safely call that “pretty old.”

While an individual trunk of the spruce may only live about 600 years, the organism will put up a new one as soon as the old trunk dies, which has allowed some of the trees to survive since just about the end of the last ice age.

A cultivated dwarf spruce: This Norway spruce was made to be small, but the ancient stunted ones in Sweden probably look about the same.
Courtesy SEWilco
The carbon-dated pretty-old tree was found in a cluster of similarly aged Norway spruces in the mountains of western Sweden, in an area that has remained untouched by commercial logging. The harsh environmental conditions of the area have forced the trees to stay very small—only about a foot and a half tall—but last several decades have brought a warmer climate to the area, and the trees have “popped up like mushrooms,” making them much easier to find in the mountainous terrain. This will also make them more fun for me to chop down when an older tree is found.

Update!
According to this article, one of the trees is 9,550 years old. There's actually a cluster of about twenty spruce that are at least 8,000 years old.

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