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The Wild Trees

Wow, I haven’t plowed through a book this fast in quite some time. The book caught my eye at Borders while on a date with Kate on Friday, picked it up from the library on Saturday afternoon and finished it on Monday. Good compensation since due to the rain I didn’t get to go on a hike with Rufus and the girls like I had hoped.

The book, The Wild Trees by Richard Preston, tells the story of the botanists who have been studying the redwood forest canopy. Amazingly, the canopy was first explored in the late 1990s. After reading this book I definitely have a new adventure goal: to climb to the top of a redwood.

Some interesting facts:

• The world’s tallest tree, and tallest living thing, is a redwood called Hyperion and stands 379.1 feet tall and 26 feet wide at breast height;
• There are 15 known trees greater than 260 feet in height;
• There are fire caves, created by lightning strikes, in the redwood canopy;
• Tons of soil is held aloft in the canopy, home for salamanders and fern gardens;
• The botanists keep the location of the trees secret, to prohibit recreational climbing — much like grottoes protecting the location of caves;
• There is more biomass in the redwood forests of the Pacific northwest then the jungles of the Amazon;
• The age of some redwoods exceeds 2,000 years.

More Information:

• Save-the-Redwoods League
• Humboldt Redwoods State Park
• Redwood National Park
• Jeb Smith State Park
• Sequoia on Wikipedia

Hopefully there will soon be an entry for our adventure to the redwoods!

© 2008 Nathan Verrill.