Friday, January 05, 2007
SIZING UP GIANTS
2 explorers hunt the tallest coast redwoods
LISA LEFF
ASSOCIATED PRESS
AP file photo
Michael Taylor stands under a huge coast Redwoods tree at Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park near Orick, Calif., in 2000. Taylor has made a sport of finding and sizing up the tallest species on the planet — California’s ancient coast redwoods. |
HUMBOLDT REDWOODS STATE PARK, Calif. — Equipped with a laser range finder, a head for numbers and an explorer's zeal, Michael Taylor has made a sport of finding and sizing up the tallest species on the planet —California's ancient coast redwoods.
"It's a frontier, one of the last frontiers," says Taylor, 40, greeting individual trees like old friends as he scouts a sheltered creek bed where he has found record-setting redwoods in the past. "And it was pretty much unexplored."
In the space of eight weeks last summer, he and fellow amateur naturalist Chris Atkins, 44, discovered what are believed to be the three tallest trees in the world, all of them higher than 370 feet and as much as 2,200 years old.
The discoverers christened them Helios, after the Greek sun god; Hyperion, his father; and Icarus, the mythological youth whose wings melted when he flew too close to the sun.
Separately and as a team, Atkins and Taylor are credited with cataloguing more extreme trees than anyone else. Yet until they located the new champions in Redwood National Park, 90 miles north of here, their achievement was unappreciated outside a tiny fraternity of similarly obsessed scientists and enthusiasts.
Now, after years of tracking trees as a hobby and at their own expense, the men are months away from completing their quest to measure all the loftiest redwoods. Coast redwoods grow in a 470-mile ribbon from southern Oregon to Big Sur, and routinely top 300 feet, or the height of a 30-story building. (The giant sequoia, the redwood's inland cousin, have massive trunks that make them the world's biggest trees by volume.)
Only 36 coast redwoods taller than 360 feet have been recorded. Atkins or Taylor had a hand in locating 28 of them. In the 370-feet-and-up category, there are only four. Atkins and Taylor found them all. Atkins, a wine salesman and father of one, says his wife is happy to tromp through fog-shrouded forests with him, but only if he leaves his range finder at home.
"She could have coined the phrase, 'They all look big to me,' " he says.
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