Arborists consider a tree that has never been climbed a wild tree. There are still a lot of wild trees on earth, but none as massive or mysterious as the remnant of coastal redwoods tucked away in Northern California.
I hadn’t thought much about the redwoods until I read a long Richard Preston piece in the New Yorker a couple of years ago. It was one of those stories that only the New Yorker dares publish in today’s quick-bite magazine world: you know, 15,000 words on redwoods. Huh?
I especially love reading about places I’m not likely to visit. “My goal is to reveal people and realms that nobody had ever imagined,” Preston writes in the foreword to The Wild Trees. A climber himself, Preston obliges by taking us into a world – the upper crowns, or canopies, of super-tall trees – that is so old and inaccessible that we know almost nothing about it. And he tells a tale of “passion and daring,” how a small group of people led by Stephen Sillett and Marie Antoine (who were married in a redwood) wound up studying the tops of the world’s oldest and largest living things. Their names seem to fit their stature: Telperion, Adventure, Stratosphere Giant, Zeus, Lost Monarch, Helios.
There are only about a hundred and twenty coastal redwoods that are more than 350 feet tall. We think they were once worldwide, but today they exist only in several small state parks and one national park. The locations of the tallest trees are carefully guarded botanist secrets. Scientists guess that the oldest are between two and three thousand years old, or as Preston says, “roughly the age of the Parthenon.”
From the ground redwood crowns, which encompass only the upper one third or less of redwoods, are completely out of sight, visible only from above or by climbing inside. This area, which scientists considered a “redwood desert” before we actually began poking around in them, includes entire ecosystems, with flora and fauna that live their entire lives in the canopy, which even has its own water storage system.
It is a strange world, filled with deadly obstacles like broken branches that can weigh several tons and sometimes crash to the earth, and filled with incredible beauty. Bonsai versions of redwoods grow from upper branches. Fern gardens take roots in soil that has somehow made its way into cavities 300 feet above the earth. Redwoods are tough trees, pretty much fire-resistant, and there are fire caves large enough to stand in and flying squirrels that have never seen humans before leaping from tree to tree.
I work in downtown Denver, so I looked up some building heights to get an idea of how large these trees actually are. The historic May D&F Tower, at 330 feet, is just below the lower end of the giant redwood scale. Hyperion tree, which was discovered and climbed for the first time in 2006, is, at 379 feet, just less than ten feet shorter than the building where I work, the Bank One Tower at 17th and Curtis streets. Think about that the next time you walk the 17th Street Mall!
Preston uses what he calls a “narrative non-fiction” style, going into great detail about how the lives of Sillett, Antoine and the others who came to this strange calling converged in the redwood forests. I got antsy reading so much personal detail in the first sixty or seventy pages. But every time Preston took me up into the upper canopy, I couldn’t put the book down.
As gearhead Preston reminds us, technology has played its part in the evolution of canopy science. One of the reasons we are able to study these tall trees is that the arborist climbing techniques that professionals use have advanced to that point only in the last couple of decades.
The Wild Trees is illustrated with line drawings that are incredible in their own right. But as I was reading, I longed for photographs of the canopies themselves. I Googled “Richard Preston” and wound up at his web site, which includes, among other things, a gallery of amazing color photos that further boggles my imagination. Given that printing photos like this would double the price of the book, it’s an excellent example of how the Internet can enhance the enjoyment of books rather than being considered a threat to their existence.