Among Redwoods – Waking Up Surrounded by Giants
Respect RedwoodsThe redwood pine cone landed
A foot in front of me
With a bang
And I knew danger! Redwood seed cones
Don’t weigh that much,
But falling 300 feet
At a speed of 32 ft/sec2,
A nice knot can be raised
On a skull
If struck by one. A tree that can soar 360 feet
Into the sky and have a diameter
Two car lengths wide
Deserves respect,
But it is their lifespans
Counted in centuries
That amazes me. How much wind and sun,
Rain and moon have they felt?
How many birds and insects
Plants and mushrooms
Bears and men
Have lived
In and beneath their branches? The Druid in me believes
That trees have awareness,
But what a redwood perceives
Over its long existence
In our weird space and time continuum
Is beyond me. But I am certain
That the redwood I
Had stood by,
Could have hit me with its cone,
If it wanted to. ©2024 Carl Scott Harker, author of
Trees and Flowers of Vincent Van Gogh.
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Some Observations on Redwoods
VISITORS to the groves of California’s giant coast redwoods stand and gaze up in silent wonder. Surrounded by the huge trunks towering upward, the leafy canopy high overhead, the shafts of light slanting down through this green ceiling, you feel small and insignificant. With the silence, the stillness, the shafts of light so dramatically defined against the shade of the great forest engulfing you a feeling of reverential awe steals over you. Many relate to these forests of giant redwoods.
Ladybird Johnson Grove is a great-one stop destination amid an entire region dedicated to the redwood forest experience. Near Orick, in northern California, Lady Bird Johnson Grove showcases massive three hundred-foot trees in old-growth forest. The 1-mile loop nature walk with hollowed trees reminiscent of Tolkien’s elf-dwellings has a sense of scale that is difficult to describe. The interpretive trail has 13 numbered stops along the way explaining a bit about the ecology and history of the redwoods.
Redwood trees over 200 feet (60 m) are common, and many are over 300 feet (90 m). The current tallest tree is the Hyperion tree, measuring 379.3 feet (115.61 m). The tree was discovered in Redwood National Park during the summer of 2006 by Chris Atkins and Michael Taylor, and is thought to be the world’s tallest living organism. The previous record holder was the Stratosphere Giant in Humboldt Redwoods State Park at 370.2 feet (112.84 m) (as measured in 2004). Until it fell in March 1991, the “Dyerville Giant” was the record holder. It, too, stood in Humboldt Redwoods State Park and was 372 feet (113.4 m) high and estimated to be 1,600 years old. This huge fallen giant has been preserved in the park to allow visitors to walk along its trunk.
Redwoods – Author: Jason Chin: An ordinary train ride becomes and extraordinary trip to the great ancient forests A subway trip is transformed when a young boy happens upon a book about redwood forests. As he reads the information unfolds, and with each new bit of knowledge… Read more …
The northern boundary of the species’ range is marked by two groves on the Chetco River on the western fringe of the Klamath Mountains, 15 mi (24 km) north of the California-Oregon border. The largest (and tallest) populations are in Redwood National and State Parks (Del Norte and Humboldt Counties) and Humboldt Redwoods State Park (Humboldt County, California), with the majority located in the much larger Humboldt County. The southern boundary of its range is the Los Padres National Forest’s Silver Peak Wilderness in the Santa Lucia Mountains of the Big Sur area of Monterey County, California. The southernmost grove is in the Southern Redwood Botanical Area, just north of the national forest’s Salmon Creek trailhead.
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