Top 5 Living Lifeforms...
crazytimes
1) Plants...
2) Bacteria...
3) Capybara...
4) Komoto Dragons...
5) Mushrooms...
really real
Number one has to be the Redwoods, which are the tallest trees in the
world and among the oldest, as they live for 2,000 years.
They are so big, they can withstand forest fires. Seeing as they live
for 2,000 years, they're bound to experience a forest fire or two in
their lifetimes.
The coast of Northern California creates the fog which allows these
giant Redwoods to flourish. The Redwood forests are 20 million years
old, which predates dinosaurs.
The coast of North America drifting into a fog zone is what is
responsible for this greatest of all living lifeforms. It's almost
enough to make a fundamentalist believe in Continental Drift Theory.
However, if you think the dinosaurs were created by g-d just a short
while ago, then you're going to have a Ronald Reagan view of the Redwoods.
Martin
> Number one has to be the Redwoods
They are the largest living things on earth. But size isn't all
important, really real
daysof48
That's right. Lyrics are all important.
Joe
Actually, they're NOT the largest; they're the tallest.
Their close relative, the Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron gigantea) has the
distinction of being the "largest" living thing on earth, as they are
bigger around than Coast Redwoods, so they contain much more biomass.
There's a total of 75 groves of Giant Sequoia, whereas the range of the
Coast Redwoods is 450 miles in length.
If anyone wants to read a phenomenal book about Redwoods, check out
Richard Preston's "The Wild Trees." It's about the people in Humblodt
County who search for, find, and climb the tallest Redwoods. I believe
that the current record holder, Hyperion, is 379 feet, which is almost 20
feet higher than the Saturn 5 rocket that took people to the moon.
I have a Redwood tree right outside my bedroom window, which is pretty
magical.
Joe
Joe
> Their close relative, the Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron gigantea)
Make that Sequoiadendron giganteum
YOU might not care, but my botany professor/guru could be a Dylan fanatic,
reading this very newsgroup...
Joe
Joe
> Their close relative, the Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) has
> the distinction of being the "largest" living thing on earth, as they are
> bigger around than Coast Redwoods, so they contain much more biomass.
> There's a total of 75 groves of Giant Sequoia, whereas the range of the
> Coast Redwoods is 450 miles in length.
I looked it up in some of my Botany books, and the diameter of a Coast
Redwood is up to 16 feet, while the diameter of a Giant Sequoia is up to
45 feet. Coast Redwods live up to 2200 years, Giant Sequoias live up to
3000 years. The tallest Redwoods are 370 feet; the tallest Sequoias are
295 feet.
The Coast Redwoods live in the Pacific coastal fog belt, a narrow strip
that's 25 miles wide; the Giant Sequoias live only in 75 remaining
groves on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada.
Both have been logged to the point where very few remain. 96% of the
Redwoods have been cut down in the last 150 years, but only 3-4% of those
that remain are on public lands. Bush has attempted (unsuccessfully!!) to
lift the ban on cutting Giant Sequoias in those remaining 75 groves, most
of which are in National Forests and National Parks.
Logging of Redwoods continues to this day.
The first American environmental organizations (Sempervirens League, Save
The Redwoods) were started as early as 1880, in response to the
clearcutting of Redwoods in Redwood City, CA, now a part of Silicon
Valley. People realized early on just how special these trees are, and
started to save them. They did that by purchasing the land where the
Redwoods reside. 100% of all the Redwoods currently protected by being in
County, State, and Federal Parks were originally donated by individuals
and organizations, and handed over to the governments for protection.
In other words, the US Government hasn't saved a single Redwood.
That's why organizations like Save The Redwoods or the Nature
Conservancy needs your contributions. What those groups do is purchase
threatened and endangered habitats, and in many cases donate them to
governments for protection.
Support those who support the majestic Redwood and Sequoia.
And make sure you visit and re-visit the cathedral-like forests where
these beauties of nature live. Listen to them, and if you're lucky, they
may share the secrets of the universe with you.
Joe
Martin
1) Bob Dylan
M. Rick
magical.
I have a red dumpster and a bum.
Gemini Jackson
>Martin <martin...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> On Sep 18, 4:41?pm, really real <reallyr...@shaw.ca> wrote:
>
>> > Number one has to be the Redwoods
>
>> They are the largest living things on earth. But size isn't all
>> important, really real
>
>Actually, they're NOT the largest; they're the tallest.
Are those the one's with the joined root system?
-GJ
Jumbo
You should tell them to cover up.
really real
> Richard Preston's "The Wild Trees." It's about the people in Humblodt
> County who search for, find, and climb the tallest Redwoods. I believe
> that the current record holder, Hyperion, is 379 feet, which is
almost > 20 feet higher than the Saturn 5 rocket that took people to the
moon.
Is that the person who wrote about climbing the Redwoods in the New
Yorker Magazine? Those two articles were incredible! They described the
ecosystems on the tops of the Redwoods and how there are life forms on
the top unlike anywhere else. The article also described how the tops of
trees the size of minivans could break off while climbing.
Martin
> Actually, they're NOT the largest; they're the tallest
Thanks for putting me right on that one. Actually, I thought
'Redwoods' was a general term for Giant Sequoias. I remember seeing
the biggest one - General Sherman is it? - in Yosemite, or Giant
Sequoia National Park perhaps. We saw some big ones in the Great
Basin National Park last month
Joe
> Is that the person who wrote about climbing the Redwoods in the New
> Yorker Magazine? Those two articles were incredible! They described the
> ecosystems on the tops of the Redwoods and how there are life forms on
> the top unlike anywhere else. The article also described how the tops of
> trees the size of minivans could break off while climbing.
Richard Preston did indeed write the New Yorker article on the Redwood
canopy, and followed it up with a book on the same exact subject.
To me it seemed as if the New Yorker article summed up the scientific
discoveries made by Steve Sillett while 350 feet up in the canopy, and in
"The Wild Trees" he expands on that, and we meet the people making the
discoveries.
Not having the URL for that article handy, here's the article:
Climbing the Redwoods*
Richard Preston**
A scientist explores a lost world over Northern California.
The coast redwood tree is an ever green conifer, a member of the
cypress family, which grows in valleys and on slopes of mountains
along the coast of Central and Northern California, mostly within ten
miles of the sea. The scientific name of the tree, which is usually
simply called a redwood, is Sequoia semperivens. A coast redwood has
fibrous, furrowed bark, flat needles, and small seed-bearing cones the
size of olives. Its heartwood is the color of old claret and is
extremely resistant to rot. It has a lemony scent. Redwoods flourish
in wet, rainy, foggy habitats. The realm of the redwoods starts in Big
Sur and runs northward along the coast to Oregon; fourteen and a half
miles up the Oregon coast, the redwoods abruptly stop.
The main trunk of a coast redwood can be up to twenty-five feet in
diameter near its base, and in some cases it can extend upward from
the ground for more than two hundred and fifty feet before the first
strong branches emerge and the crown of the tree begins to flare. The
crown of a tall coast redwood is typically an irregular spire that can
look like the plume of a rocket taking off. Very few trees of any
species today other than redwoods are more than three hundred feet
tall. The tallest living coast redwoods are between three hundred and
fifty and three hundred and seventy feet high - the equivalent of a
thirty-five-to-thirty-seven-story building.
In its first fifty years of life, a coast redwood can grow from a seed
into a tree that's a hundred feet tall. Redwoods grow largest and
tallest in silty floodplains near creeks, in spots that are called
alluvial flats. There, a redwood can suck up huge amounts of water and
nutrients, and it is protected from wind, which can throw a redwood
down. In its next thousand years, it grows faster, adding mass at an
accelerating rate. The living portion of a tree is a layer of tissue
called the cambium, which exists underneath the bark. If the cambium
of one of the bigger coast redwoods were to be spread out into a flat
sheet, it would be nearly half the size of a football field. Each
year, a coast redwood can add one millimetre of new growth to its
cambium, or the equivalent of one ton of new wood.
As a young redwood reaches maturity, it typically loses its top. The
top either breaks off in a storm or dies and falls off. A redwood
reacts to the loss by sending out new trunks, which typically appear
in the crown, high up in the tree, and point at the sky like the
fingers of an upraised hand. The new trunks shoot upward from larger
limbs, traveling parallel to the main trunk, or they emerge directly
out of the main trunk and run alongside it. The new trunks send out
their own branches, which eventually spit out more trunks through the
crown. The resulting structure is what mathematicians call a fractal;
botanists say that the tree is forming reiterations. The redwood is
repeating its shape again and again.
With the passing of centuries, the reiterated trunks begin to touch
one another here and there. The trunks fuse and flow together at these
spots, like Silly Putty melting into itself The bases of the extra
trunks bloat out, and become gnarled masses of living wood called
buttresses. In the crowns of the largest redwoods, bridges of living
redwood are flung horizontally from branch to branch and from trunk to
trunk, cross-linking the crown with a natural system of struts and
cantilevers. This strengthens the crown and may help it to grow
bigger, until it can look like a thunderhead coming to a boil, There
are often blackened chambers and holes in the trunks - fire caves,
caused by big forest fires. The tree survives and regrows its burned
parts, and it continues to thrust out new trunks.
Botanists judge the size of a tree by the amount of wood it contains,
not by its height. By that measure, the largest species of tree is the
giant sequoia, a type of cypress that is closely related to the coast
redwood. The biggest living giant sequoia trees have fatter and more
massive trunks than the coast redwoods. But the coast redwood is the
tallest species of tree on earth. Extremely large coast redwoods are
referred to as redwood giants. The very biggest are called titans.
Currently, about a hundred and twenty coast redwoods are known to be
more than three hundred and fifty feet tall. Eighty per cent of them
live in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, along the Eel River, in Humboldt
County, in Northern California. No one knows exactly how old the
biggest coast redwoods are, because nobody has ever drilled into one
of them to count its annual growth rings. Botanists think that the
oldest redwoods may be somewhere between two thousand and three
thousand years old. They seem to be roughly the age of the Parthenon.
One day in early 2003, I arrived at the office of Stephen C. Sillett,
on the campus of Humboldt State University, in Arcata, a coastal town
in Humboldt County. Winter storms had been passing through, and Arcata
smelled of redwoods and the sea. Sillett is an associate professor of
botany, and he is the principal explorer of the redwood-forest canopy,
the three-dimensional labyrinth that exists in the air above the
forest floor. He is one of the world's better tree climbers. One
reason I had come to Humboldt was to see Sillett climb a redwood.
Sillett conducts his research with a group of graduate students and a
few other scientists, whom he trains in advanced tree-climbing
techniques. I had never met Sillett, and didn't quite know what to
expect. "Steve can come across as brusque, but it's because he's so
focused," his brother, Scott Sillett, explained to me one day on the
telephone. Scott is an ornithologist at the Smithsonian Institution,
in Washington, D.C., who studies songbirds. "Steve is one of the most
passionate and curious scientists I know. I love birds, but even I can
get sick of them. Steve never seems to get sick of trees."
I found Steve Sillett in his office, a windowless room with white
walls, stretched out in a chair before a computer, working on some
data from the canopy. He was wearing olive-green climbing pants, a
pullover shirt, and mud-stained climbing boots. Sillett is
thirty-seven years old, of medium height, and he has a lean body with
flaring shoulders, huge forearms, and adept-looking hands. His hair is
light brown and feathery, and his eyes, set deep in a square face, are
dark brown and watchful. Sillett's manner is usually laid-back, but he
can act fast. He once fell out of the top of a big redwood named
Pleiades I, which is three hundred and ten feet tall. Dropping through
the air, he reached out and caught a branch with one hand. This ripped
his shoulder out of its socket and tore a bit of flesh out of his
hand, but it also stopped his fall. He ended up hanging from the
branch by a bleeding hand and a dislocated shoulder, twenty-eight
stories above the ground and feeling a bit surprised with himself
"We're primates. Those opposable thumbs are awesome," he explained.
The forest canopies of the earth are realms of unfathomed nature, and
they are largely a mystery. They are also disappearing - they are
being logged off rapidly, burned away, turned into fragments and
patches and they are perhaps being altered by changes in the earth's
climate caused by human activities. Sillett said, "We want to try to
understand the basic biology of the redwood canopy, because it will
give us a blueprint for how things should work in an old-growth
redwood forest."
Redwoods are able to reshape the local climate and environment in
which they live. They change the chemical nature of the soil, and they
assume control of vital resources in the forest, particularly sunlight
and water. "We're trying to get a feel for how much water is stored in
the canopy - in the trees, in their foliage, in the canopy soil, and
in other plants that live in the canopy," Sillett said. "There's a lot
of water up here. These trees are controlling the movement of the
water in this forest. How do they do that? What will happen to these
forests as the climate changes with global warming? The way the world
is going, our work in the canopy could be just a task of documenting
something before it winks out."
In 1995, Sillett received a Ph.D. in botany from Oregon State
University, in Corvallis. Soon afterward, he took his present job, at
Humboldt, and began to explore the old-growth redwood canopy. No
scientist had been there before. The tallest redwoods were regarded as
inaccessible towers, shrouded in foliage and almost impossible to
climb, since the lowest branches on a redwood can be twenty-five
stories above the ground. From the moment he entered redwood space,
Steve Sillett began to see things that no one had imagined. The
general opinion among biologists at the time - this was just eight
years ago - was that the redwood canopy was a so-called "redwood
desert" that contained not much more than the branches of redwood
trees. Instead, Sillett discovered a lost world above Northern
California.
The old-growth redwood-forest canopy, Sillett found, is packed with
epiphytes, plants that grow on other plants. They commonly occur on
trees in tropical rain forests, but nobody really expected to find
them in profusion in Northern California. There are hanging gardens of
ferns, in masses that Sillett calls fern mats. The fern mats can weigh
tons when they are saturated with rainwater; they are the heaviest
masses of epiphytes which have been found in any forest canopy on
earth. Layers of earth, called canopy soil, accumulate over the
centuries on wide limbs and in the tree's crotches - in places where
trunks spring from trunks - and support a variety of animal and plant
life. In the crown of a giant redwood named Fangorn, Sillett found a
layer of canopy soil that is three feet deep. Near the top of
Laurelin, or the Tree of the Sun, which is three hundred and
sixty-eight feet tall and still growing, Sillett found a huge,
sheared-off trunk with a rotted, damp center. Masses of shrubs are
growing out of the wet rot, sending their roots down into Laurelin.
Sillett and his students have found small, pink earthworms of an
unidentified species in the beds of soil in the redwoods. A Humboldt
colleague of Sillett's named Michael A. Camann has collected aquatic
crustaceans called copepods living in the fern mats. The scientists
have not yet been able to determine the copepods' species. Sillett
said, "They commonly dwell in the gravel in streams around here." He
can't explain how they got into the redwood canopy. A former graduate
student of Sillett's named James C. Spickler has been studying
wandering salamanders in the redwood canopy. The wandering salamander
is brown and gold, and it feeds on insects, mainly at night. Spickler
found that the salamanders were breeding in the redwood canopy, which
suggests that they never visit the ground - this population of
salamanders appears to live its entire life cycle in the redwood
canopy.
Old redwood trees are infested with thickets of huckleberry bushes. In
the fall, Sillett and his colleagues stop and rest inside huckleberry
thickets, hundreds of feet above the ground, and gorge on the berries.
He and his students have also taken censuses of other shrubs growing
in the redwood canopy: currant bushes, elderberry bushes, and
salmonberry bushes, which occasionally put out fruit, too. Sillett has
discovered small trees - wild bonsai - in the canopy. The species
include California bay laurel trees, western hemlocks, Douglas firs,
and tan oaks. Sillett once found an eight-foot Sitka spruce growing on
the limb of a giant redwood.
Over the years, forest-canopy researchers have developed a variety of
techniques for gaining access to forest canopies. These include
towers, walkways, balloons, high-powered binoculars (the researcher
looks at the canopy but doesn't go there), direct tree climbing (which
is what Sillett does), and construction cranes. There is, for example,
the Wind River Canopy Crane, which is situated in the Gifford Pinchot
National Forest, in southwest Washington. The crane has a gondola at
the end of a long arm, which can deliver a scientist to any point in
the canopy that's within reach, including to the tips of branches, and
the gondola can go as high as two hundred and twenty feet above the
ground. The disadvantage of a crane is that it's expensive to operate,
and it's rooted in one spot. The Wind River crane is able to penetrate
roughly one and a half million cubic metres of tree space. Steve
Sillett and his colleagues are able to explore roughly twenty billion
cubic metres of old-growth redwood forest. In any event, the Wind
River crane wouldn't be able to get a person into the crown of the
taller giant redwood trees, since many of them are mostly or entirely
above the highest reach of the crane.
When Sillett and his colleagues are aloft in redwood space, and moving
around from place to place, they make use of tree-climbing ropes and a
safety harness called a tree-climbing saddle. They wear helmets and
soft-soled boots (spikes can damage a tree). Tree climbers normally
hang suspended in midair in a harness attached to ropes looped over
solid parts of the tree above them called anchor points. The ropes are
attached to the climber's saddle by means of carabiners, which are
strong aluminum or steel clips. Tree climbers often move very lightly
over branches, keeping most of their weight suspended on their anchor
ropes. A skilled tree climber can travel horizontally or at diagonals
through the crown of a tree while he's hanging in midair, and not even
touch the tree with his body. He may toss a length of rope here or
there, getting the rope over a new anchor point, and then he can pull
himself to a different place in the tree.
Tree climbing is quite different from rock climbing. Rock climbers
move upward over a vertical surface of stone by using their hands and
feet to obtain friction and support. They are not suspended from taut
ropes (except sometimes in the type of rock climbing called aid
climbing). A rock climber advances upward while a safety rope, held by
a person called a belayer, trails loosely below him. The rope is there
in case the rock climber loses his grip on the stone and falls. In
tree climbing, the rope is used as the main tool for gaining height
and for moving around. The bark of a tree is crumbly and soft, and a
climber cant get any kind of secure grip on it with his hands and
feet. The branches of a tree can snap off.
The method by which Steve Sillett and his colleagues climb redwoods is
known as a modified arborist-style climbing technique. Arborists, or
tree surgeons, get around in trees using a special soft, thick, strong
rope. When the rope is passed over an anchor point, it is formed into
a long loop or noose, which is tied with a sliding knot called the
Blake's hitch. The Blake's hitch was invented in 1990 by a tree
surgeon in California named Jason Blake. He popularized it among
arborists. It looks a little bit like a hangman's knot, though it
functions in a different way. It is a friction knot - it can grip
securely on a length of rope, or it can slide on the rope, depending
on how the knot is manipulated. By sliding a Blake's hitch, a tree
climber can shorten or lengthen a loop of rope over an anchor point,
and move upward or downward. A climber can also lock the Blake's
hitch, and thereby hang motionless.
In the late nineteen-eighties, Sillett was a biology major at Reed
College, in Portland, Oregon, and had already decided that he wanted
to become a canopy scientist; for his senior thesis at Reed, he began
climbing tall Douglas-fir trees. A few years later, when he was a
graduate student at Oregon State, he got a telephone call from an
arborist named Kevin Hillery, who had happened to read Sillett's
college thesis. Sillett told him that he was using boots with spikes,
called climbing spurs, and a short rope called a flipline to get
himself up the trunks of the trees - he was climbing the Douglas firs
in the way that an electrical worker climbs up a telephone pole.
Hillery said, "If you need spurs to climb a tree, you shouldn't be
climbing trees." He offered to teach Sillett the arborist-style
climbing technique. Sillett soon began developing his own style of
climbing. Sillett's method differs from the classical arborist
technique in that he ascends into the crown of a redwood along a
single strand of rope called the main rope. Once he gets up into the
crown, he detaches himself from the main rope and moves around using a
shorter length of rope. (Most arborists don't ascend trees on a main
rope, since most trees aren't tall enough to require one.)
The process of getting into the crown of a tree is known to tree
climbers as the entry To accomplish an entry into a redwood, Sillett
ties a fishing line to an arrow and then, with a hunting bow, shoots
the arrow over a strong branch somewhere in the lower crown of the
tree. He then ties a nylon cord to one end of the fishing line. By
pulling on the other end, he drags the cord over the branch. He ties a
rope - which will be the main rope - to the cord and drags it over the
branch. Now the main rope is hanging in an upside-down U over a branch
in the crown of the tree. He ties one end to a smaller, nearby tree,
and then he climbs up the loose, hanging end of the rope using
mechanical ascenders (of the kind that rock climbers and cavers use).
Sillett says, "You loft yourself into the lower crown on a main rope,
and then you detach yourself and move from branch to branch."
To do so, Sillett uses a complicated rig of rope and carabiners, sixty
feet long, which he calls a double-ended split-tail lanyard, or a
motion lanyard. The lanyard works in the same basic way as does
Spider-Man's silk. A climber can attach either end to an anchor point.
By attaching alternate ends, he can move around while always staying
attached to the tree by at least one strand of rope. Sillett is not
immune to a fear of heights. At odd moments when he's aloft in the
deep canopy, often when he's hanging from a branch on a motion
lanyard, a kind of waking dream flashes over him. For a second, he
seems to feel something break, and then he seems to feel himself
turning in space as he falls for twenty or thirty stories along the
trunk of a giant coast redwood.
The crown of an ancient coast redwood can bristle with rotting extra
trunks, and it can be crisscrossed with dead limbs that may be up to
several feet in diameter, and there can be broken-off dead branches
hanging in the foliage, which are called widow-makers. The twitching
movement of a climbing rope can stir loose a widow-maker, and a
falling branch can tear off other branches, triggering a cascade of
spinning redwood spars the size of railroad ties. A falling branch can
spike itself five feet into the ground. Redwoods can have pieces of
dead wood in them that are bigger than Chevrolet Suburbans. Sillett
carries a little folding saw with him and uses it to cut away any
small, hazardous dead branches, "but with the big hazards we just have
to rely on hope," he says. Redwoods occasionally shed whole sections
of themselves. Sillett calls this process calving. The tree releases a
kind of woodberg, and as it collapses it gives off a roar that can be
heard for a mile or two, and it leaves the area around the calved
redwood looking as if a tank battle had been fought there. A calving
event would obliterate any humans in the tree. Sillett told me, "The
thing I fear most is a falling branch that hooks on my rope. It would
slide down the rope into me, and it would tear through my body cavity,
You are a grape hanging on a vine, and a falling branch can pop you."
The tallest living part of a tree is called the leader. The leader of
a coast redwood is often a delicate spindle, covered with papery bark,
and its branches are brittle. When Sillett reaches one, he sometimes
takes off his boots and socks and hangs them on a branch, and then he
climbs barefoot to the top. "It makes sense to have a form of
communication with the tree," he says.
In the summer of 2000, while Sillett was attending a scientific
conference, he met a canopy scientist named Marie Antoine. They
started climbing redwoods together, and were married soon afterward.
Antoine, a slender woman in her late twenties, was born and raised in
Canada. She is an expert in lichens and a lecturer at Humboldt State.
Sillett and Antoine live in a small yellow house in the his
overlooking Arcata. They keep their tree-climbing gear in the garage.
In the eighteen-forties, when American settlers arrived in Northern
California, the redwood forest amounted to roughly two million acres
of virgin, old-growth trees. Loggers began cutting down the redwoods
with axes and handsaws, using the wood for making barns, houses,
fences, and railroad ties. In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, the
introduction of logging machinery, chainsaws, and Caterpillar tractors
vastly increased the speed of logging along the northern coast of
California, and the old-growth redwood forests began to disappear.
Most of these forests ended up being owned by timber companies. As a
rule, they carried out clear-cutting operations, in which no tree of
any worth was left standing. In all, close to ninety-six per cent of
the virgin redwood forest was cut down. Some botanists, including
Steve Sillett, believe that during the logging a number of redwood
titans were felled that were bigger than any of the living giant
sequoia trees are today. In other words, before the logging, the coast
redwood was probably the largest tree on earth, not just the tallest.
About ninety thousand acres of old-growth redwoods have remained
intact, in patches of protected land. The remaining scraps of the
primeval redwood-forest canopy are like three or four fragments of a
rose window in a cathedral, and the rest of the window has been
smashed and swept away. "Oh, man, the trees that were lost here,"
Sillett said to me one day as we were driving through the suburbs of
Arcata. "This was the most beautiful forest on the planet, and it's
almost totally gone. This is such a sore point."
Conservationists won a major victory in 1999, with the signing of a
deal known as the Headwaters Agreement, between the federal government
and one of the largest redwood-timber companies, Pacific Lumber, which
is a subsidiary of Maxxam. The agreement, and subsequent deals, gave
the government title to a large part of Pacific Lumber's old-growth
redwood tracts, including the seventy-five-hundred-acre Headwaters
Forest, half of it virgin redwood, in the mountains southeast of
Eureka, California. The government paid Pacific Lumber three hundred
and eighty million dollars. However, stretches of virgin redwood
forest left on private timber-company lands continued to be logged.
Today, the timber-company lands in Northern California - owned by
Pacific Lumber, Green Diamond Resource Company, and others - are
managed for high-volume production of young redwood trees. The tracts
are logged off on a schedule, typically every fifty years or so. It is
increasingly difficult to find any redwood trees growing on
timber-company land which are more than eighty years old. Sillett has
climbed in these trees. Their crowns are nearly devoid of life. They
are a redwood desert.
In his office, on the day I first met him, Sillett tapped on a mouse,
and a computer-generated image of a grove of redwoods appeared on the
screen. "You need to look at some redwood architecture," he said. The
grove, he explained, is named the Atlas Grove, and it is in Prairie
Creek Redwoods State Park, which is a sliver of protected old-growth
redwood forest that hugs the sea along the northern part of Humboldt
County. The computer image was a three-dimensional map of the crowns
of the trees in the Atlas Grove; he had made the map from data that he
and his associates had gathered in years of climbing them. The Atlas
Grove is tiny - it is about three hundred and fifty yards long by
thirty-five yards wide - and it is a jam of monstrous redwoods with
reiterated crowns. The Atlas Grove may be the oldest grove of living
redwoods; although Sillett isn't sure exactly how old it is, judging
by the height, the amount of rot in the dead parts of the trees, and
the types and abundance of epiphytes, it seems to have come into
existence around the time of Julius Caesar. The Atlas Grove was
discovered in 1991 by a tall-tree explorer named Michael Taylor, who
is a friend of Sillett's. Discovery, in the case of a giant tree,
doesn't necessarily mean that the tree has never been seen before -
the grove had been known to some park rangers. It means that nobody
has understood the tree's size, or has measured it.
Sillett named most of the trees in the grove after Greek gods.
(Generally, the discoverer of a redwood names it: Sillett often gives
the tree a name only after he's climbed it and gained a sense of its
character. There's no formal process - the names are private, known
mostly to the botanists who study redwoods.) "That's Prometheus,
that's Epimetkeus, and that's Atlas - they were all brothers," Sillett
said, pointing to the screen. The trees looked something like witches'
brooms standing on their handles. He tapped the mouse again, and the
images began to rotate. "Atlas has these three huge trunks in its top,
like a trident," he said. "Atlas is so full of soil and plants that
you get this overwhelming sense of a tree holding up the earth. Here's
the Pleiades. And that's Kronos and that's Rhea."
The biggest tree in the Atlas Grove is a redwood titan named Iluvatar.
Sillett named the tree after the creator of the universe in J. R. R.
Tolkien's "The Silmarillion." "Iluvatar is so complex that you can't
tell much about it just by looking at it," he said. On the screen,
Iluvatar rotated slowly, as if we were flying around it in a
helicopter. The crown of Iluvatar contains two hundred and ten trunks,
and it fills thirty-two thousand cubic yards of space. It took Steve
Sillett, Marie Antoine, and four graduate students roughly ten days of
climbing apiece to make a 3-D map of the crown. With these data,
Sillett, along with an expert in giant trees named Robert Van Pelt,
performed a calculation that shows that Iluvatar contains thirty-seven
thousand five hundred cubic feet of wood. Iluvatar is one of the
largest living things on the planet.
I asked Sillett where the Atlas Grove was, exactly.
He gave me a guarded look "It's something you cant print."
Botanists are secretive about the locations of rare plants. They fear
that any contact between humans and rare plants can be disastrous for
the plants. Sillett is particularly worried about recreational tree
climbers. Recreational tree climbing is an evolving sport, or emerging
oddity, which is practiced by a thousand or so people in the United
States but is rapidly growing in popularity It apparently got its
start in 1983, when a certified arborist in Atlanta named Peter
Jenkins began teaching all sorts of people, including children, how to
climb trees safely using a rope and a harness and the arborist
climbing technique. He founded a tree-climbing school called Tree
Climbers International. The classroom of Tree Climbers International
consists of two white-oak trees on a plot of land near downtown
Atlanta.
Sillett is widely admired by recreational tree climbers, but his
feelings about them are laced with foreboding. "Not only are redwoods
sensitive to damage from climbing but the whole habitat of the redwood
canopy is fragile," Sillett explained, that day in his office. "It
cannot survive without damage if people start climbing around in it
for recreational reasons." He believes that recreational climbers
would try to climb the biggest and tallest redwoods if they knew their
exact locations, and they wouldn't bother to get anyone's permission.
Climbing a tree without permission is an accepted part of the culture
of recreational tree climbing. It is called doing a ninja climb or
poaching a tree.
The U.S. National Park Service is in charge of issuing research
permits for the parks where most of the remaining giants and titans
among the coast redwoods stand. Sillett and other canopy scientists
are allowed to climb in the parks only between the middle of September
and the end of January each year. During the rest of the year, the
National Park Service closes the redwoods to climbing in order to
allow the spotted owl and a seabird called the marbled murrelet to
nest in the redwoods without being disturbed.
Sillett closed the view of the Atlas Grove on his computer, and stood
up. "So, have you seen enough?"
"Not really. I was wondering if I could climb in the redwood canopy
with you." He didn't answer. He looked me over with a kind of
professional coolness. His eyes seemed to focus on my face and neck,
my torso, and my hands. "Are you a tree climber?"
"Yes, I am."
"These trees are gnarly. All it takes to get yourself killed is one
mistake." I told him that I knew something about climbing trees. I'd
come across the Tree Climbers International school one day while I was
surfing on the Internet. I had never really thought about tree
climbing, it sounded weirdly appealing. I got a flight to Atlanta, and
I began to learn the art of movement in a forest canopy. By the time I
met Steve Sillett, I had had about twenty hours of basic training. In
addition, I had climbed half a dozen trees near my house, which is in
New Jersey But, in Sillett's view, I knew essentially nothing about
climbing redwoods. I had never heard of some of the advanced equipment
that Sillett uses, like the motion lanyard; in fact, many professional
tree climbers have never heard of it, either.
Sillett said that while he was happy to have me walk around on the
ground in the redwoods with him and his colleagues, he was not
interested in taking me up into the canopy, at least not immediately
(His brother, Scott, who climbs with him every now and then, explained
later, "It's definitely true that Steve doesn't trust the climbing
skills of others. It takes such focus to climb safely.")
And so I returned to Atlanta for further training. One day in April, I
found myself seventy feet above the ground, dangling from a branch on
a rope like a Christmas ornament, practicing the skills needed to get
oneself safely from place to place in a tree. It was a cool, blue day,
and the wind was blowing. I was suspended at the point of a V formed
by two loops of ropes. By sliding Blake's hitches, I shortened one
loop while I lengthened the other. This changed the shape of the V,
from an asymmetrical V oriented toward the left to an asymmetrical V
oriented toward the right. In this way, I traveled horizontally in
midair to a different place in the tree. In the distance, the
rectilinear towers of Atlanta glittered in the sun.
Back home in New Jersey, I ordered from an arborist supply company
sixty feet of half-inch tree-climbing rope, four carabiners, and two
split tails, which are short pieces of rope that are tied with Blake's
hitches to the longer piece of rope. When these things arrived, I
assembled a motion lanyard. At first, I practiced with the lanyard
while I was standing on the ground - I heaved its ends up over
branches in a maple tree in my front yard. Then, wearing a climbing
saddle and a helmet, I raised myself into the air with the lanyard,
and got about six feet off the ground. In an ash tree that grows off
to the side of my house, I ascended sixty feet by throwing the ends of
the motion lanyard over higher and higher anchor points - that is, I
lanyarded my way to the top of the tree. I extended my circle of
climbing, and began to explore a forest canopy that ranges up a
hillside above my house.
The forest canopy on my hill extends from about fifty to a hundred
feet above the ground. It is composed of the crowns of sugar maples,
red oaks, white oaks, chestnut oaks, hickories, ash trees, tulip
poplars, and some tall, beautiful old beech trees. As I became more
adept at movement in trees, I became better able to go laterally, or
on diagonals, through the air. Birds seem to pay little attention to a
person hanging on a rope in a forest, and it's not always clear that
they are able to identify such an object as a human being. Sometimes
flocks of birds sweep through the canopy and divide around a climber
or move. beneath him. Flying squirrels are tame in the canopy I've
reached out a finger and stroked their fur on occasion. (They close
their eyes when you stroke them, but they soon tire of it, and plummet
off the branch, catch the air, and soar away.) During climbs into
taller trees, I was occasionally able to look down on the backs of
birds, which shine with reflected sunlight as they move through the
green depths of the canopy, like schools of fish.
Sillett and George W. Koch, a tree physiologist from Northern Arizona
University, and a graduate student named Anthony R. Ambrose have
installed electronic monitoring systems in seven of the biggest and
tallest redwoods. The monitoring systems consist of weather stations
at various spots in the trees, and different kinds of bio-probes, and
the systems are linked together with up to half a mile of data cables
strung in each tree. The scientists are trying to learn how redwoods
move water through their trunks and branches and how they manage to
grow so tall.
George Koch is a lanky, genial man in his forties, with knotted arms
and an easygoing manner. Sillett taught him how to climb trees. "I'm
like a kid in a candy shop, climbing these
three-hundred-and-sixty-foot-tall trees with Steve," Koch said to me
one day when I visited him in Arcata. "The overwhelming question for
me is what determines the height of a tree. At around three hundred
and seventy feet, the tallest redwoods seem to be approaching a
ceiling, which is based on a limit in height to which any plant can
lift water. Why aren't the redwoods six hundred feet tall?"
Exactly how an extremely tall tree delivers water to its top is a
matter of deep interest to Koch and Sillett. Trees bring water upward
from their roots through a network of microscopic pipes called the
xylem. The pipes are unbroken from the bottom to the top of a redwood.
It takes a few weeks for water that is absorbed in a redwood's roots
to get to the top of the tree. A redwood can move water upward through
its pipes against two million pascals of negative pressure. (The
pascal is a standard measure of pressure used by physicists, and
negative pressure is basically a sucking force.) Sillett and Koch have
been looking for an engineered system that sucks water at two million
pascals, so that they can do experiments. But they can't find such a
system. Apparently, redwoods are better at pulling water than any
human technology is.
In a spell of dry years, air bubbles seem to form in a redwood's pipes
and stop the continuous flow of water, and the top dies and usually
falls off. In wetter periods, a redwood regrows its top. "Redwoods
have an incredible ability to reiterate new trunks," Koch went on. "A
side branch will take off and shoot skyward, and in a matter of a
hundred years it will become the new leader - the new top - of the
tree."
In any ecosystem in which they occur, redwoods tend to dominate. They
tower above other species of trees, and they shade them out, killing
them or making it nearly impossible for them to grow. Trees are
horrible to one another, and redwoods are viciously aggressive. They
drop large pieces of dead wood on smaller neighboring trees, which
typically shatters the tree. Sillett calls this phenomenon "redwood
bombing." In this way, a giant redwood suppresses and kills trees
growing near it, including hemlocks, spruces, Douglas firs, and
big-leaf maple trees. A giant redwood can clear a DMZ around its base,
an area covered with redwood debris mixed with twisted and dead trees
of other species.
Redwoods are monoecious, which means that the plant is both male and
female. The female organs of the tree are its round, knobby seed
cones. A redwood's male organs are small, nubbin-like cones, called
strobili, which appear at the tips of branches and release pollen. The
grains of pollen contain sperm cells that fertilize egg cells inside
the female cones, and seeds are produced. Over its lifetime, a redwood
can release ten billion seeds. It may be that only one of the seeds
gets lucky and becomes a mature redwood tree. If a redwood is sheared
off at its base, or if it burns to a blackened spar, it can send up
from its roots a circle of small trees, or clones, having DNA
identical to the parent tree's. The clones become a ring of redwoods
in the forest, forming a structure called a cathedral tree.
Redwoods are exceedingly efficient at gathering light. A grove of
redwoods is able to soak up more than ninety per cent of the sunlight
falling on the crowns of the trees. Young redwoods are able to survive
in dark places, where almost no other trees can survive, since they
come into existence in the deep shade of their elders. When an old
redwood falls, creating an opening in the canopy, sunlight splashes
onto smaller redwoods, and they leap upward, rapidly becoming big
trees. Little redwoods can sometimes crop up in thickets of slender
trunks.
Scientists suspect that such a group of small redwoods may be joined
at its roots, and also may share a common root system with a large
redwood nearby - but nobody really knows. The small redwoods and the
big redwood may all exchange water and nutrients with one another. It
is possible that the root systems of the redwoods in a forest are
fused into a web underground, so that they can be thought of as a
single living thing. These are all questions that remain unanswered by
science.
In the darkness before dawn on a cold November morning near Arcata,
Marie Antoine was hurrying around her kitchen. She was singing to
herself in a dreamy kind of way. That morning, she wore a gray hooded
cashmere sweater, cream-colored slacks, and climbing boots. She tossed
a handful of blueberries into a blender. "Steve, do you want a
smoothie?"
"Definitely," he answered. He and I were kneeling on the living-room
floor, nearby, and he was inspecting a heap of my climbing equipment,
which I'd taken out of a duffelbag. He stood up, and led me through a
door into the garage, where a hank of climbing rope, sixty feet long,
was coiled on a hook on the wall. It was a new rope, and it was bare -
it didn't have any carabiners or knots rigged in it. "This is yours,
if you want it. I'll tie it up for you."
"I brought my own split tails," I said. I carried the rope back into
the living room, and laid it on the floor, and from the duffelbag I
took out two split tails and four carabiners, and I tied up my motion
lanyard while he watched.
He sipped his smoothie. "Dude, you're doing it. Where did you learn
this?"
"I've been practicing a little," I said. I tied the last Blake's hitch
and sat back on my heels.
He inspected the knots. "Sweet," he said. He picked up the motion
lanyard and handed it to me. "You can stuff it into your climbing
bag." A motion lanyard weighs eight pounds. When it isn't in use, it
is kept inside a bag, which is normally clipped to the climber's foot
stirrup.
The blender whirred. "Which tree are we going to?" Antoine asked.
"I think we need to go to Adventure," Sillett said.
Adventure is one of the world's largest-known coast redwoods. It is
three hundred and thirty-four feet tall, and it contains thirty-one
thousand cubic feet of wood. The main trunk is sixteen feet in
diameter near ground level, and it maintains huge girth nearly all the
way to the top of the tree. It has a total of forty extra trunks.
Adventure has four fire caves in its crown, two of which are large
enough for a person to go inside. Much of the center of the tree seems
to be rotten. It is in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, a few miles
from the Atlas Grove. The precise location of Adventure is a secret
that is known to fewer than twenty people, most of whom are botanists.
Sillett and Antoine asked me not to reveal its exact location, for
fear that recreational tree climbers might try to poach it.
"Adventure Tree is never exactly my first choice," Marie Antoine
commented. "My first experience climbing that tree was kind of scary."
Later, I asked her what had been scary about Adventure.
"I got lost in it."
The stretch of the California coast which includes Prairie Creek
Redwoods State Park is covered with temperate rain forest; it receives
eighty inches of rain a year. Even so, places in the park consist of
patches of open prairie, where herds of elk graze. The redwoods along
the edge of the prairie looked like ruined Doric columns. The road
went among them, the canopy closed in overhead, and the world grew
dark and quiet - redwoods mute sounds. Adventure lives at the bottom
of a small valley. We parked and put on backpacks full of
tree-climbing gear. Marie Antoine led the way. We went along a trail,
and then left the trail and pushed through masses of sword ferns and
walked in zigzags around them. The ferns were chest-high and were
soaking wet - it had rained during the night. The forest floor
consisted of a soft duff of rotting redwood foliage, and it was
spattered with redwood sorrel - small, emerald-green plants that have
heart-shaped leaves. The trunks of the trees soared into remote
crowns. Blades of sunlight angled through the canopy, and they
glittered with droplets of water falling from the tips of branches.
The sky was pale blue, without a cloud.
We went down into a gully and arrived at a small creek A redwood log
spanned the creek, forming a natural bridge across it. Adventure grew
out of the bank on the other side: I saw a megacylinder of wood with a
thermonuclear crown.
We crossed the creek by walking on top of the log, which was slippery,
and scrambled up onto the bank at the base of the tree. Sillett opened
his backpack and pulled a climbing rope from it. He threaded the rope
up through an attachment point higher in the tree and back down to the
ground.
The rope was six hundred feet long, dusty black in color, and just ten
millimetres thick It had a breaking strength of three tons - it was
strong enough to lift a car. It is sometimes called black tactical
rope, and it is favored by the Special Forces for vertical operations
at night. The redwood scientists like it because it's lightweight yet
super-strong and can seem nearly invisible. "We like to go low-pro,"
Sillett explained.
The black rope hung down the side of the tree which faced away from
the stream, a nearly featureless shaft without any solid branches on
it for two hundred and fifty feet. Sillett took one end and tied it to
a small tree. The other end dangled loosely down from the anchor
point, far up in the crown; he would climb up the dangling end of the
rope. This is known as a ground-anchored climbing rope. He put on his
helmet and his climbing saddle. He turned on a two-way radio, tested
it, and put it in a pocket on his chest.
While Sillett was getting ready to climb, Antoine led me around to the
other side of the tree. It consisted of a towering system of extra
trunks, some living and some dead, that ran upward along the stream
side of Adventure for more than twenty stories. Antoine put her hands
in her pockets and stared up into the structure. "The pieces of dead
wood shiver fifty feet over your head when you move around in there,"
she said, peering up into it. "The first time I climbed this tree with
Steve, he told me to go to a certain place, and I misunderstood." She
ended up wandering among columns of rotten wood, which wobbled and
seemed ready to collapse. Finally, she tied herself to a live branch
and called her husband on the radio and asked him to come and get her
and show her the way out. It took him twenty minutes to find her, and
when he did she was embarrassed - she didn't like needing to be
rescued.
Back at the other side of the tree, Sillett clamped a pair of
mechanical ascenders to the black rope, and then he began to climb
upward, sliding his ascenders on the rope in a one-two type of motion
which climbers call jugging. A raven called somewhere in the upper
canopy. This was followed by a delicate pip, pip, pip, which was
coming from somewhere closer to the ground.
Antoine picked up her radio. "Steve, was that a kinglet?"
"It could be a wren tit." He had become a tiny homunculus moving up
the bulwark of the tree.
"Adventure just scoffs at the puny humans who try to climb it,"
Antoine remarked to me.
Sillett vanished into the crown. Time passed. We put on our helmets
and saddles. I sat down under a fern, and picked up a sprig of dead
redwood foliage. Two mushrooms grew on it.
Our radios crackled. "O.K., Marie, you can go ahead and release the
anchor."
"O.K., I'm going to untie the anchor, Steve. I will let you know when
it's done. "Their radio talk was precise. Any mistake in communication
could result in someone's death. (Sillett once saw a climbing
companion fall ninety-six feet from a Douglas fir. The friend was a
professional climber who had made one small mistake. Miraculously, he
lived.) Antoine went over to the small tree and untied the knot. "The
anchor is now untied, Steve."
Sillett, up in the tree, tied a knot near the middle of the black
rope, and then anchored the knot around a branch, so that both ends of
the black rope hung down along different sides of the tree. Antoine
and I would simultaneously climb up the opposite ends of the rope.
"You guys can start moving up," Sillett said on the radio.
I clamped my ascenders to my length of the black rope, and I clipped
the bag containing the motion lanyard to my foot stirrup. Then I began
to jug upward on the rope, along the basal flare of the tree. Twenty
feet above the ground, the tree's bark was charred and pitted with
fire scars - a small fire on the ground had made the scars, perhaps
within the past two hundred years. I kept on jugging. Seventy feet
above the ground, I passed a burl, which is a type of benign growth
that occurs on trunks. The burl was the size of a pumpkin. I continued
climbing upward, along a furrowed wall of wood. Marie Antoine was
climbing somewhere around the horizon of the trunk, out of sight.
I reached a height of about a hundred and thirty feet. I was now forty
feet higher than I had ever climbed in the canopy in New Jersey, and I
was just entering the lower edge of the redwood crown. The light began
to brighten. The rope to which I was attached ran straight upward into
the crown, and it vibrated with tension from the weight of my body.
When canopy scientists want to travel in a circle around the trunk of
a large tree, they swing like a pendulum at the end of a long rope. I
decided to try it. I planted my feet against the tree, and pushed off
I drifted a considerable distance outward, floating gently away from
the trunk. On the forest floor below, the clumps of sword ferns looked
like green stars. They turned around - I was spinning. I drifted back
to the tree, and kicked off again, harder, and drifted farther away
from the tree. It seemed, perhaps, like walking on an asteroid, where
there is only slight gravity The curve of the trunk formed a horizon
like that of the small worlds in "The Little Prince."
Marie Antoine appeared - she had circled around the tree to see how I
was doing.
The bark was covered with a lumpy white crust that looked like sugar
frosting. "What's this stuff?" I asked.
"It's Pertusaria. It's a lichen."
Pertusaria is also called wart lichen. I moved my eyes closer. The
warts were' mingled with splotches of a grayish-green dust, which was
sticking to the bark. The dust, Antoine explained, is another lichen,
called Lepraria. It is supposed to resemble the infected skin of a
leper. The Lepraria, in turn, was mixed with fingering spurts of a
lichen called Cladonia. The Cladonias are among the most beautiful of
lichens. They come in wild shapes - trumpets, javelins, stalks of
pinto beans, blobs of foam, cups, bones, clouds, and red-capped
British soldiers. This Cladonia looked like pale-green tongues of
flame. Scattered near it were clusters of orange disks that looked
like tiny pumpkin pies. It was a lichen called Ochrolechia, Antoine
said. The cracks in the bark were lined with pin lichens - tiny black
dots standing up on stalks, like the heads of pins shoved into the
wood. It occurred to me that in order to see a giant tree you need a
magnifying glass.
We climbed side by side for a distance, until we arrived at a stob - a
dead, broken-off stump of a branch. It was surrounded by huckleberry
bushes and leatherleaf ferns. The ferns trembled in a breeze that
flowed up the side of the tree. The stob was home to what looked like
a miniature Japanese garden, about six inches across. We hung
suspended in the air before the garden, while Antoine pointed out its
sights: "That's Lepidozia, a liverwort. That's a little liverwort
called Scapanie - it looks like tiny ladders." She pointed to tufts of
shimmering, bright-green moss. "That's Dicranum. It's all over
redwoods." She estimated that the garden on the stob was several
hundred years old.
I climbed for a while on the other side of the tree. I wanted to see
the array of trunks which looms over the creek, on the dark side of
Adventure. I pendulated in that direction. When I arrived there, I
found myself in the middle of a Gothic tower of fusions, bridges, and
spires, held up by flying buttresses. The zone was crisscrossed with
branches, and the trunks ran out of sight in both directions, upward
and downward.
Directly in front of me, at a height of a hundred and eighty feet, was
a fire cave. It is called the Upper Fire Cave, and its mouth is
plastered with dirt-canopy soil. By gripping on ridges of bark, I was
able to pull myself to the edge of the cave. It proved to be a sort of
airy chamber in the underside of a flying buttress, and it opened
downward into empty space - it is more like a fire ceiling than like a
fire cave. I ended up hanging in midair, a few feet below the charred
ceiling, looking straight down to the stream. There was a faint sound
of rushing water. I saw strands of computer cables emerging from the
cave walls, where Sillett and his team had implanted electronic
probes. I touched the wall of the cave. It was moist, and it had a
yellowish color and a musty smell, and it felt like Stilton cheese.
Two hundred and fifty feet up, the crown of Adventure billowed into a
riot of living branches. By this time, the ground had disappeared - it
was hidden below decks of foliage in the lower parts of the redwood
canopy - and the sky was invisible, screened by tents of foliage
overhead. This was the deep canopy, a world between earth and air.
Steve Sillett was nowhere to be seen.
I was now climbing fifteen feet above Marie Antoine. Even though we
were still far below the top of Adventure, we were considerably higher
than the top of the average tropical-rain-forest canopy. If the upper
surface of the Amazonian canopy had existed here, it would have been a
hundred feet below us. At this point, the main trunk of Adventure was
seven feet in diameter. Now the huckleberry thickets began in earnest.
The species was the evergreen huckleberry, a relative of the wild
blueberry that grows in Maine. In November, in the California rain
forest, the huckleberry leaves were tinged with scarlet at their
edges. The bushes were all over the tree: perched on its branches,
occupying its crotches, and popping out of the trunk. I wormed through
them, following the black rope upward.
At two hundred and ninety feet, I encountered Sillett. He was sitting
on a branch inside a spray of huckleberry bushes, and he had a
thoughtful look on his face. The main trunk had split open near the
branch where he sat, and the opening revealed dead and rotten wood
inside the tree. "This beast is full of rot pockets," he said. "These
huckleberry bushes are putting their roots through the scars into
rotten wood in the center of the tree. One summer, we had half the
normal rainfall, but these bushes still put out a full crop of
huckleberries. They're getting their water from rotten wood inside the
tree." He pointed to something on the side of the tree. "Check out
that little brown moss over there."
"Which moss?"
"The one that looks like it's dead."
I hung out over a branch and looked at the moss. It was a
greasy-looking thatch growing below a wound at the base of a stob.
Redwood sap had been dribbling over the moss.
"It's called Orthodontium gracile," he said. "It's an extremely rare
moss. It often lives below wounds in old-growth redwoods. It likes the
resin. It's nearly gone in Oregon. That's because old-growth redwoods
in Oregon have been slaughtered."
I had reached the upper end of the black rope. Nearby, I saw the
bottom end of a second climbing rope, a white one, which was hanging
down along the trunk of the tree. It wandered upward and out of sight,
toward the top of Adventure. Sillett suggested that I get on. I
transferred my ascenders to the white rope, and climbed up it for
about thirty feet, wriggling through a jungle gym of redwood branches
and huckleberry shrubs. The bag that held my motion lanyard bumped
along through the bushes. Then, abruptly, the crown thinned out, and a
view opened across Adventure Valley.
The white rope came to an end about fifteen feet below the top of the
tree. No ropes led to the top. I took the motion lanyard out of my
bag, attached it to my saddle with carabiners, and threw one end over
a branch above me. I pulled it back to me, to form a noose over the
branch, and clipped the noose to my saddle. Then I detached myself
from the white rope.
There is something unnerving about leaving the main rope behind and
going into free motion in the crown of a redwood tree. The main
climbing rope is a lifeline that connects a climber to the ground, and
it is the escape route out of the tree. Once you disconnect from the
main rope, you are on your own. If you wander far from the main rope,
you can end up moving through a maze of wood as tall as an office
building by means of a short piece of rope, with no way to get down to
the ground unless you can find the main rope again.
With my weight on the motion lanyard, I leaned back, until my body was
horizontal and my feet were planted on the trunk, and I walked up the
trunk of Adventure. I threw one end of my lanyard over a higher
branch, clipped it back to my saddle, and pulled myself up. Suddenly I
hung near the top of the tree. At three hundred and twenty-eight feet,
I found myself in the middle of a bush studded with huckleberries. I
began eating them. They were tart and crunchy. The branches in the
tree's top were festooned with beard lichens - they looked like the
frizzy beards of dwarves. It was a sunny day, and a breeze was
blowing, which stirred the lichen beards, and the air held a tang of
the sea - the Pacific Ocean lay over a ridge to the west. Adventure
rocked in the breeze, like a ship riding at anchor.
The uttermost top of Adventure is dead. It is a gray trunk, encrusted
with lichens, which extends about six feet above the huckleberry bush,
and ends at a sheared-off stump. Adventure used to be a taller tree.
Its top fell off, probably in a storm, perhaps four hundred years ago,
or roughly at the time that Shakespeare wrote "The Tempest." By then,
it had already been growing for a thousand years, or maybe more like
fifteen hundred years. ("Who the hell knows how old it is," Sillett
said.) The branches around me trembled. A lanyard flipped over a
nearby branch, and Marie Antoine appeared. She trunk-walked up to a
kind of platform of branches, and sat in the middle of them. "The top
of this tree is just a big old juicy dead-wood pit," she said.
The dead trunk at the top of Adventure is a natural water tank, she
explained. Rainwater collects in the broken stump at the top, and the
water runs down inside Adventure, where it saturates the rotten wood
like a sponge. A coast redwood tree seems to have the ability to send
out roots from any part of its tissue, including its top. Adventure
may be sending roots out of the living wood in its top, which run into
the dead trunk, and feeding on the dead parts of itself
The next day, in the afternoon, I sat down at the base of Adventure,
while Sillett went aloft. He had been having trouble with a computer
system that he had installed in Adventure, and he wanted to try to fix
it. It was getting to be late, and it grew dark on the forest floor,
but there was sunlight in the crown of Adventure. I called Sillett on
the radio. "Where are you?"
"At the Upper Huckleberry Cave."
"Where's that?"
No answer. I put on my helmet and saddle, and began jugging up the
black rope. I found him at two hundred and thirty feet, hanging from
his motion lanyard inside a rampart of extra trunks, a long way from
the main rope. I climbed up the main rope until I was fifteen feet
above Sillett, and then I pulled out my lanyard, flipped one end of it
over a branch, and clipped it back to my saddle. Then I released
myself from the main rope and dangled on the lanyard. The trunk was a
fissured wall going down into shadows. Suddenly, I was very aware that
I was hanging more than twenty stories above the ground. I lengthened
the noose, and dropped twenty-five feet, until I was hanging below
Sillett. I kicked against the trunk, swung away from the tree, and
then came back toward him. I grabbed the end of a rope that Sillett
had left draped over a branch, and, using my ascenders, climbed up the
rope at a diagonal to Sillett's location. When I got there, I anchored
my motion lanyard over a branch, and I hung in the air next to him.
We were suspended below a cracked and decayed expanse of holes in the
tree - the Upper Huckleberry Cave. Sillett was hanging in front of a
fibreglass box. The box, which was attached to a branch, held a
computer controller that gathered data from all the instruments that
were installed in the tree. A laptop computer was sitting on top of
the box, and he was staring at the screen.
He seemed exasperated. "Every time we climb Adventure, it kicks our
butts," he said. "I think it's cursed."
He fished a Leatherman tool out of a pouch and began tinkering with it
inside the box. The sun had set behind a ridge, and an evening breeze
had sprung up. The tree's branches and needles began to give off a
hissing sound. "Do you feel that?" he said. "We're moving."
Adventure began to do something that felt like slow breathing. Each
sway' of the tree took several seconds to complete. The redwoods
around Adventure were also tracing deep, slow sways, and their
movements were independent of one another: they were going in
different directions. The trees seemed intensely alive.
Sillett watched the motion of the redwoods in silence for a little
while. "Despite the difficulty of doing science in these trees,
there's always a moment during a climb when you can lose yourself," he
went on. "You perceive time more clearly in redwoods. You see time's
illusory qualities. When you get up into the crown of a redwood, you
stop thinking about your life, you stop planning your future missions.
You start feeling the limits of your perceptions of the world as a
member of the human species. When you feel one of these trees moving,
you get a sense of it as an individual."
"Do you really think of this tree as a kind of entity?" I asked.
"It's a being. It's a 'person,' from a plant's point of view. Plants
are very different from animals, but they begin life with a sperm and
an egg, the same way we do. This organism has stood on this spot for
as many as two thousand years.
Trees can't move, so they have to figure out how to deal with all of
the things that can come and hurt them. This tree has burned at least
once. The fire must have continued inside some of these caves for a
long time - the caves were smoldering orange holes in the tree for
weeks. Redwoods don't care if they burn. After the fire, the tree
went, 'Wooaah,' and it just grew back."
The wind died, and the forest became silent. A fluting call came from
the air near us. Sillett looked around. "Maybe a Swainson's thrush."
He poked with his Leatherman at the electronics. "A tree is not
conscious, the way we are, but a tree has a perfect memory. If you
injure a tree, its cambium - its living wood - will respond, and the
tree will grow differently in response to the injury. The trunk of a
tree continually records everything that happens to it. But these
trees have no voice. My life's work is to speak for these trees." He
paused. "Dude, it's getting dark It's time to go down."
Three hundred and fifty-three feet above an alluvial flat in the
Humboldt Redwoods State Park, near the top of a coast redwood named
Idril, Steve Sillett and Marie Antoine were sitting side by side in
the branches. I was attached to the tree with my motion lanyard, near
them. My lanyard was anchored around the uttermost top of the tree.
Idril is about eight inches thick at that point. The top of the tree
is crowded with wires and instruments and a solar panel - Sillett's
gadgetry We were at the upper surface of the world's tallest forest
canopy.
I tightened my lanyard, and inched myself up a little higher. The
whole top swayed.
"Watch your foot," Sillett said. I had nearly kicked a bioprobe out of
the bark.
The upper surface of the canopy was a bubbly froth of redwood crowns,
and each tree seemed to have a slightly different color of green.
There were deep greens, gray-yellow greens, brown greens, deep-blue
greens, and bluish grays. "It's because these trees have a huge amount
of genetic variability," Antoine said. It began to rain, and the
colors grew sharper. Here and there, skeletons of dead tops seemed to
glow - these were redwoods entering middle age. "You can see the
Stratosphere Giant," Sillett said, pointing to a green cloud that
burst above the canopy to the east of Idril.
On July 30, 2000, an amateur redwood researcher named Chris K. Atkins
was bushwhacking around in a little-visited stand of redwoods in the
park, using a laser range finder to measure the heights of the trees.
On that occasion, Atkins discovered what is currently believed to be
the world's tallest tree. He named it the Stratosphere Giant. Sillett
measures the Stratosphere Giant once a year, each September, when he
climbs it with Marie Antoine, and they run a tape measure along the
trunk. This past September, they found that the Stratosphere Giant was
three hundred and seventy feet two inches tall. It is the only living
tree that is known to have surpassed three hundred and seventy feet,
and it is presently growing taller by about four inches a year. It is
eighteen feet across at the base, and is around two thousand years
old.
The rain became steady. We descended Idril in stages, one by one,
rappelling down a rope. Partway down, we stopped in a cluster of
branches, and we left the main rope and anchored off on our lanyards.
With his lanyard anchored around a branch above him, Sillett stepped
out onto a branch, lengthening the lanyard as he went. He was using
the lanyard to maintain his balance and to prevent his full weight
from pressing on the branch itself - this is called branch walking.
Sillett walked lightly along the slender branch nearly to its tip. He
looked almost weightless, and he leaned out and touched the branches
of a neighboring redwood. "You could easily get into that tree from
here," he said.
We were now at two hundred and fifty feet, near the bottom surface of
the canopy in this grove. I clamped a descender to the black, main
rope. I released my motion lanyard and tucked it away in its bag. With
my weight now on the main rope, I released the descender brake and
began to slide down. Then I kicked away from Idril as hard as I could.
As I swung from the tree, I opened the brake on the descender full
wide. The rope began to rush through the descender, and I fell out of
the canopy on a fast rappel. Huge columns appeared, the trunks of
trees that stand around Idril, and I floated weightless down through
redwood space.
Joe
Redwoods and Sequoias are in the same Family, and at one point, were in
the same Genus, but that changed decades ago. The General Sherman (Giant
Sequoia) tree is the biggest tree on the planet, and it's in Sequoia
National Park, in the Sierra east of Fresno. The tallest Redwood is
somewhere on the far north coast of California, probably in Humboldt
County, but its location is being kept secret.
But again, each tree has somewhat of a limited distribution.
Neither of them live in the Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada,
but that park IS the location of the Rocky Mountain Bristlecone Pine, the
oldest tree on the planet, living close to 4000 years.
If you were there and saw some massive trees, most likely those were
Utah Juniper. They get big, but nowhere near as big as even baby Redwoods.
Joe
really real
>
> Richard Preston did indeed write the New Yorker article on the Redwood
> canopy, and followed it up with a book on the same exact subject.
>
> To me it seemed as if the New Yorker article summed up the scientific
> discoveries made by Steve Sillett while 350 feet up in the canopy, and in
> "The Wild Trees" he expands on that, and we meet the people making the
> discoveries.
>
And this mornings New York Times has a travel article on the Redwoods
This link may only work for people who've signed up for the NYTimes
website (which is free.)
http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/travel/escapes/19mile.html
Babs
>
> read more »
What a humbling photo!
Joe
> And this mornings New York Times has a travel article on the Redwoods
> This link may only work for people who've signed up for the NYTimes
> website (which is free.)
> http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/travel/escapes/19mile.html
Thank you. I would have never seen that article had you not posted the
URL.
I've spent time in the last few years in all the locations mentioned
in that article that are in California. I take Botany classes in the San
Francisco Bay Area, and most of them include fieldtrips. I'll be returning
to the Northcoast Redwoods in October, weather permitting, and if not, we
plan to go about 100 miles east of the Redwoods, to a unique area of
Northern California that those interested in trees call The Miracle Mile.
There's nowhere else on earth with the biodiversoty of Conifers as exists
in the Russian Wilderness, specifically, the hike to Little Duck Lake. In
one mile, there are 17 different conifers.
Yow. And after all this writing about Redwoods, maybe I'll go visit Muir
Woods today? It's only about 20 minutes from where I live...
Hmmm. I can't think offhand of Dylan singing anything about trees.
Joe
really real
Nah, Dylan's always been a tree hugger
Floater:
There’s a new grove of trees on the outskirts of town
The old one - long gone
Ten foot, two foot, six across
Burns with the bark still on
Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum:
I have more than some
They walk amongst the stately trees
They know the secrets of the police
Mighty Quinn:
Ev'rybody's 'neath the trees,
Feeding pigeons on a limb
Man of Peace:
Trees that've stood for a thousand years suddenly will fall
Wanna get married? Do it now
>
>> http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/travel/escapes/19mile.html
>
> Thank you. I would have never seen that article had you not posted the
> URL.
>
> I've spent time in the last few years in all the locations mentioned
> in that article that are in California. I take Botany classes in the San
> Francisco Bay Area, and most of them include fieldtrips. I'll be returning
> to the Northcoast Redwoods in October, weather permitting, and if not, we
> plan to go about 100 miles east of the Redwoods, to a unique area of
> Northern California that those interested in trees call The Miracle Mile.
> There's nowhere else on earth with the biodiversoty of Conifers as exists
> in the Russian Wilderness, specifically, the hike to Little Duck Lake. In
> one mile, there are 17 different conifers.
>
> Yow. And after all this writing about Redwoods, maybe I'll go visit Muir
> Woods today? It's only about 20 minutes from where I live...
>
>
> Joe
>
>
crazytimes
> > Hmmm. I can't think offhand of Dylan singing anything about trees.
>
> Nah, Dylan's always been a tree hugger
>
> Floater:
> There’s a new grove of trees on the outskirts of town
> The old one - long gone
> Ten foot, two foot, six across
> Burns with the bark still on
>
> Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum:
> I have more than some
> They walk amongst the stately trees
> They know the secrets of the police
>
> Mighty Quinn:
> Ev'rybody's 'neath the trees,
> Feeding pigeons on a limb
>
> Man of Peace:
> Trees that've stood for a thousand years suddenly will fall
> Wanna get married? Do it now
He's also sang of other people's trees...
'From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters'...
'They took all the trees, they put ‘em in a tree museum'...
And his own:
'Strap youself to a tree with roots'...
Joe
> Nah, Dylan's always been a tree hugger
> Floater:
> Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum:
> Mighty Quinn:
> Man of Peace:
Thanks for making my day ;-)
Joe
Joe
I just went to Bobdylan.com and searched the lyrics for the word "tree"
and got 93 hits.
I guess Dylan has been botanized too.
Joe
really real
> I just went to Bobdylan.com and searched the lyrics for the word "tree"
> and got 93 hits.
>
> I guess Dylan has been botanized too.
Ecology is a theme that comes up a lot in Dylan's latest songs.
Joe
Now that I'm in my 60s, I guess my short-term memory is going. After all,
I could recite lyrics from all his older albums, and even though I have
his most recent albums, and love them, I guess the recent lyrics haven't
seared themselves into my brain in quite the same way.
Joe
really real
>
> Now that I'm in my 60s, I guess my short-term memory is going. After all,
> I could recite lyrics from all his older albums, and even though I have
> his most recent albums, and love them, I guess the recent lyrics haven't
> seared themselves into my brain in quite the same way.
No, of course they haven't. The new songs don't work the way the old
songs did, and even if they did, we might not notice as there is so much
more to listen to these days.
The new songs are too wordy - they go on and on. This would be okay if
there were Desolation Row, but they're more like riffs in many ways.
However, the good news about us senior citizens is that the internet
provides us with memory helpers.
Martin
> 'Strap youself to a tree with roots'...
Crazytimes: email me for Gene Vincent info!
Joe
> However, the good news about us senior citizens is that the internet
> provides us with memory helpers.
Exactly.
When Modern Times first came out, I had the lyrics bookmarked.
And what's even better...setlists to live shows I attend are online
the next morning. It sure helps me remember the night before...
Joe
crazytimes
Alright...
Joe
> It's funny how I got nothing but eyerolls for noting how low last
> month's post tally was, and yet now everyone is working SO hard to
> litter the newsgroup with trivial posts.
Redwoods may be trivial to you, but that's your loss.
They sure are meaningful to me, and have provided me with as much joy as
has the music of Bob Dylan.
Joe
Manna
> Redwoods and Sequoias are in the same Family, and at one point, were in
> the same Genus, but that changed decades ago.
That's some speedy evolution, innit?
;)
Manna
listing an entire kingdom as a single life form. Umm, twice. Har-
umph!
5. Axolotl
4. Spanish Moss
3. crocus
2. 3-toed sloth
1. Schizosaccharomyces pombe
Joe
But, in the immortal words of Grace Slick:
Redwoods talk to me
Say it plainly
The human name
Doesn't mean shit to a tree
a tifele dot
> poisoned rose <whydoIstillbot...@usenet.com> wrote:
> > It's funny how I got nothing but eyerolls for noting how low last
> > month's post tally was, and yet now everyone is working SO hard to
> > litter the newsgroup with trivial posts.
>
> Redwoods may be trivial to you, but that's your loss.
Joe, may i interfere for a few seconds or minutes? May i first
suggest that you " did not get the riff " of pr and then add that i
understand your passion for redwoods. Trees have been and still are my
friends. Not too long ago I spent time at the Avenue of Giants and i
must say, soft and low, loud and clear, We as a Human Race, has
strayed too far from the trees. Let's begin the replanting.
My friend jonEric (johnny in the song) knows a lot about trees and the
stories, some of them prophetically beautiful, say that "the leaves
shall be for the healing of the nations." May this quote, from the
Book of Revelations, serve our life purposes' well as we ready
ourselves for the birth of the world. For a good year, sing yourself
in the Book of Life. You can sign too if your hands are free. Either
way the singing will be most appreciated. Always.
And now I must come and go and go and come, sideways preferably,
and see if i can put the next goal in with a certain degree of finesse
and adroitise. Can't promise anything of course. Even if I thought I
could I would have to annul those baggages of illusions before I sing
- or someone does - Kol Nidrei. Why? Because it is written that the
journey of life is fraught with them, so we might as well choose those
we will get to enjoy the most.
Does this ring a bell ?
Well, well, well, I hope so. Ringing bells and lighting candles is a
favorite addiction of mine and so I found out that in general (an
exception to that being Burma-Myanmar), it is easier for me to light
candles than to ring bells. Yet I like sound as much as light, I can
love both, particularly when they find themselves entwined in one or
more voices.
Is my perspective utterly strange and unique?
Nay, i don't think so. It may be that my language and well practiced
field of phenomenology are a bit ahead of mass thinkin', that's all.
The time is approaching for that to change. The Times They Are Truly
A'Changin' and thoughts patterns do too. Not a moment too soon, not a
moment too late. All is just right. Just because we are not able to
pierce the Mystery does not mean that we cannot influence it. Thinking
Good ain't a bad influence on that time envelope we are flying on.
Don't hold on to it too tight, it too is an illusion. An illusion in
need of great blessings. Illusions become realities too, you know. The
blessing remains its own true self, through all worlds and all
universes.
Well, well, well, I am babbling on and on, surely this must be rmd.
Time to let go into the flow and see where Joy travels. Take breath.
Joy and Love to the World
for the Birthday of the World, the only One and the 5769th one, the
two wrapped in one. May more good tidings manifest in our present and
our future.
Shabbat Shalom
Tif
really real
>
> Redwoods may be trivial to you, but that's your loss.
>
> They sure are meaningful to me, and have provided me with as much joy as
> has the music of Bob Dylan.
Joe, don't worry about being attacked by poisoned rose. Just work around
him.
Poisoned rose is one of our local trolls who has nothing to say about
Bob Dylan, so of course he would have nothing to say about the Redwoods.
I don't know why he comes around here, but when he does, it's usually to
attack other people for saying interesting things.
Joe
> I don't know why he comes around here, but when he does, it's usually to
> attack other people for saying interesting things.
Sadly, the trees of the forests and the wildflowers of the meadows go
unnoticed by most, trolls and non-trolls alike.
Considering that flora produces 100% of the oxygen, it's pretty bizarre
that most people are oblivious to them.
Hmmm. Coincidence that most people also think Dylan can't sing?
Joe
really real
> Sadly, the trees of the forests and the wildflowers of the meadows go
> unnoticed by most, trolls and non-trolls alike.
>
> Considering that flora produces 100% of the oxygen, it's pretty bizarre
> that most people are oblivious to them.
>
> Hmmm. Coincidence that most people also think Dylan can't sing?
I've noticed how many people never really use their senses to appreciate
the world around them. I'm glad to run into someone like you in rmd who
has this appreciation. Perhaps we should continue this discussion
offline. Can you email me at dfr...@shaw.ca
Martin
wrote:
> It's funny how I got nothing but eyerolls for noting how low last
> month's post tally was, and yet now everyone is working SO hard to
> litter the newsgroup with trivial posts
What's even more apparent about your posts than your constantly
snooty, huge database-toting attitude is your virtual lack of a sense
of humour
really real
>
> What's even more apparent about your posts than your constantly
> snooty, huge database-toting attitude is your virtual lack of a sense
> of humour
I used to think that one of poisoned rose's problems was a virtual lack
of a sense of humour, but I discovered that he does make jokes now and then.
Poisoned Rose's real problem is a virtual lack of being able to laugh at
himself. He has an utter lack of self knowledge. OI can only hope and
pray that one day he will look at his posts and see them the way the
rest of us see them.
Manna
ALERT:
ALERT:
What I am about to type my contain mischief, sarcasm, irony or
facetiousness.
Just to keep things juicy, I won't tell you which.
On Sep 19, 8:43 pm, Joe <j...@nospam.com> wrote:
> Manna <myholys...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Sep 19, 10:15 am, Joe <j...@nospam.com> wrote:
> > > Redwoods and Sequoias are in the same Family, and at one point, were in
> > > the same Genus, but that changed decades ago.
> > That's some speedy evolution, innit?
>
> Scientific naming of flora and fauna is a human construct.
Mmm. Something I obviously didn't know.
Martin
wrote:
> self-loathing Jewish
> Canadian
Wow... you're a racist too..?
Gemini Jackson
<whydoIst...@usenet.com> wrote:
>I don't think one can sum up my problem so easily. It's not like you can
>just casually shrug "He's an overcompensating, self-loathing Jewish
>Canadian who's eternally bitter about being told he's not tall enough to
>ride on roller coasters."
You're Canadian?
-GJ
Joe
>>>> Redwoods and Sequoias are in the same Family, and at one point, were in
>>>> the same Genus, but that changed decades ago.
>>> That's some speedy evolution, innit?
>>
>> Scientific naming of flora and fauna is a human construct.
> Mmm. Something I obviously didn't know.
Ahhh. Another one of those "everything I learned, I learned from Bob
Dylan" people. Dylan may have indeed sung, "God gave names to all the
animals" but I hate to break it to you, he was wrong.
A couple of centuries ago, it was Carl Linnaeas who came up with a system
that we call Scientific Naming, or Taxonomy. All creatures are classified,
so that you are in the Primate Family, and are a Homo Sapien. Human is the
common name of your species. Likewise, Redwood is the common name for the
Sequoia sempervirens, a tree that's in the Taxodiaceae family.
Which of course is probably much more than you wanted to know.
Hey, if anyone here lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is interested
in learning more about the local native plants, taught by a Dylan fanatic
no less, I lead native plant walks that are all free and open to the
public. Check out http://www.marin.edu/cnps
This time of year, I tend to focus on edible plants.
Some of which, I should warn you, are just disgusting. I feel bad for the
Native Americans; the food they ate was just gross. Today, I bit into a
perfectly edible Bay Laurel nut (scientific name = Umbellularia
californica) and it took about 2 hours to get the foul taste out of my
mouth.
Joe
Martin
> Hey, if anyone here lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is interested
> in learning more about the local native plants, taught by a Dylan fanatic
> no less, I lead native plant walks that are all free and open to the
> public. Check outhttp://www.marin.edu/cnps
If I had seen your message during our stay at the Green Tortoise on
Broadway & Colombus last month, we would have readily taken your
advice, as both our sons are keen on natural history. My eldest is a
big Darwin fan, and we recently attended a lecture at the Natural
History Museum in London on earthworms, and why they were so important
to Darwin. The prospect of a nature trail led by a Dylan fanatic is
tempting to say the least. Unfortunately, we are back at home in the
drizzly, cold grey skies of South East England now, maybe next time..?
The Hysterical Bride
I'm a huge natural history fan. Whenever I would get dragged to a
museum (quite often) I would run to the evolution exhibit (especially
showing ape to man). I always thought that was the coolest thing in
the musuems.
Martin
> I'm a huge natural history fan. Whenever I would get dragged to a
> museum (quite often) I would run to the evolution exhibit (especially
> showing ape to man). I always thought that was the coolest thing in
> the musuems
Where abouts do you fit in to the equation?
Joe
> If I had seen your message during our stay at the Green Tortoise on
> Broadway & Colombus last month, we would have readily taken your
> advice, as both our sons are keen on natural history. My eldest is a
> big Darwin fan, and we recently attended a lecture at the Natural
> History Museum in London on earthworms, and why they were so important
> to Darwin. The prospect of a nature trail led by a Dylan fanatic is
> tempting to say the least. Unfortunately, we are back at home in the
> drizzly, cold grey skies of South East England now, maybe next time..?
Although I generaly ascribe to the notion, "Don't follow leaders, watch
the parking meters," I intend to be leading nature hikes forever. It's
been a lot of fun these past few years and I keep learning more and more
and more and more.
I went to the Natural History Museum in London when I was last there, to
see the Who perform Quadrophenia in Hyde Park. Great place. I'll never
forget seeing the invention there of Thomas Crapper, finally realizing
where the word "crap" came from.
Do they still have that virtual roller coaster ride through the universe?
I just about crapped my pants on that ;-)
Joe
The Hysterical Bride
I'm not sure I understand the question.
Martin
> I'm not sure I understand the question
Just tryin' to be friendly
The Hysterical Bride
I didn't come from monkeys.
I'm a direct descendant of Adam, who G-d placed in the Garden, and he
gave names to all the animals.
;) (LOL!)
kerry
> Manna <myholys...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>> Redwoods and Sequoias are in the same Family, and at one point, were in
> >>>> the same Genus, but that changed decades ago.
> >>> That's some speedy evolution, innit?
>
> >> Scientific naming of flora and fauna is a human construct.
> > Mmm. Something I obviously didn't know.
>
> Ahhh. Another one of those "everything I learned, I learned from Bob
> Dylan" people. Dylan may have indeed sung, "God gave names to all the
> animals" but I hate to break it to you, he was wrong.
>
> A couple of centuries ago, it was Carl Linnaeas who came up with a system
> that we call Scientific Naming, or Taxonomy. All creatures are classified,
> so that you are in the Primate Family, and are a Homo Sapien. Human is the
> common name of your species. Likewise, Redwood is the common name for the
> Sequoia sempervirens, a tree that's in the Taxodiaceae family.
>
> Which of course is probably much more than you wanted to know.
>
> Hey, if anyone here lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is interested
> in learning more about the local native plants, taught by a Dylan fanatic
> no less, I lead native plant walks that are all free and open to the
>
> This time of year, I tend to focus on edible plants.
>
> Some of which, I should warn you, are just disgusting. I feel bad for the
> Native Americans; the food they ate was just gross. Today, I bit into a
> perfectly edible Bay Laurel nut (scientific name = Umbellularia
> californica) and it took about 2 hours to get the foul taste out of my
> mouth.
>
> Joe
Hey Joe, I moved out of San Francisco to Concord a couple of years
back, and would LOVE to meet up for a native plant walk, especially
since I homeschool my 2 youngest kids...you sound like a perfect
person to learn from! Hopefully I'll be seeing you in the not too
distant future!
I will look you up for sure, asap!!
Manna
ALERT
ALERT:
some of what I type below may contain all those other things I
mentioned before
> >> Scientific naming of flora and fauna is a human construct.
> > Mmm. Something I obviously didn't know.
>
> Ahhh. Another one of those "everything I learned, I learned from Bob
> Dylan" people. Dylan may have indeed sung, "God gave names to all the
> animals" but I hate to break it to you, he was wrong.
>
> A couple of centuries ago, it was Carl Linnaeas who came up with a system
> that we call Scientific Naming, or Taxonomy. All creatures are classified,
> so that you are in the Primate Family, and are a Homo Sapien.
Oh, blah blah blah. I'm sorry, my love, but you have it all wrong,
and I already know Bob had it wrong too. 5000 years ago or there
abouts, God paraded all the animals in front of Adam, and Adam named
all of them. I suppose Adam named all the plants too, and since fungi
and bacteria aren't plants anymore, I suppose I should mention that
Adam probably named them too, along with Monera. They can't put
everything in the Bible (like the fact that God let Adam use his
microscope), you know, you do have to figure out some things for
yourself. It took Adam a long long time to name all those organisms,
but he lived for some 950 years, so I guess he probably had the time
if he worked diligently.
And how dare you call me a Homo sapien? Even if I were such a thing,
I wouldn't be a practicing Homo sapien.
Joe
> Hey Joe, I moved out of San Francisco to Concord a couple of years
> back, and would LOVE to meet up for a native plant walk, especially
> since I homeschool my 2 youngest kids...you sound like a perfect
> person to learn from! Hopefully I'll be seeing you in the not too
> distant future!
> I will look you up for sure, asap!!
With this past spring being both the driest and coldest in recorded
history, I've slown down to only 2 per month. The website
(www.marin.edu/cnps) will be updated in the next couple of days to list
all the hikes until the end of the year.
Then in a couple of months, I'll probably go back to a twice-a-week
schedule. Feel free to join up on any of them, but, be prepared. As Bob
Dylan would have said, if he'd been a nature freak, "there's no such thing
as bad weather, only poorly prepared hikers."
Joe
M. Rick
God: Who's there?
Dylan: Freddy.
God: Come right in, Bob.
Dylan: Thanks. Nice place you got here.
God: Mi casa es su casa.
Dylan: Cool. Hey God, I got a question for you.
God: Shoot.
Dylan: Do you know my song Man Gave Names To All The Animals?
God: Sorry, I missed that one.
Dylan: Lately I've been wondering if man actually named all the animals.
God: 'Fraid not, Bob.
Dylan: Then why did you say he did?
God: Are you accusing me of flip-flopping?
Dylan: The Bible says Adam named the animals.
God: Actually Adam didn't know his ass from his elbow. I named all the damn
animals.
Dylan: I don't believe you.
God: Whatever.
Dylan: The Bible says it so it must be so.
God: Listen Bob, I've got a lunch date with Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Cleopatra
and Clara Bow.
Dylan: That's quite a line-up.
God: You're welcome to come, but none of this Bible literalist stuff please.
Dylan: I'm craving a shrimp cocktail.
God: It's on me, Bob.
Bill Kawalec
"really real" <reall...@shaw.ca> wrote in message
news:r5aBk.11232$Il....@newsfe09.iad...
really real has an utter lack of ANY knowledge.