The World's Tallest Tree is Trying to Look Short
Written: Dec 05 '00 (Updated May 26 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: It's very tall ...
Cons: ... according to the sign.
The Bottom Line: A great place, but the World's Tallest Tree is not the reason to go ...
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| Urbanist's Full Review: Redwood National Park |
Update: The World's Tallest Tree (WTT) lost its top in a storm in 2001, thereby ceasing to be the WTT and throwing all the numbers in this review out of whack. The newly crowned WTT is believed to be in Armstrong Redwoods State Park in Sonoma County, but sensibly, they won't tell you which one it is. I have left the review intact, as it still seems current in its essence.
The "Redwood National Park" category has become a catch-all for all kinds of opinions about the Redwood Coast, including the culturally colorful Eureka-Arcata area. But Redwood National Park is actually much further north, almost in Oregon. Not much of the countercultural influence of Arcata's Humboldt State University makes it up here. This deep coastal forest is mostly uninhabited -- just a few Native American villages and some small towns that make what they can off of the summer tourist season.
Many people get here and are not sure what to do. Several readily accessible groves offer an easy one mile hike if you just want to get a feel for the redwoods, but it's unlikely you came this far, over 300 miles from either San Francisco or Portland, just for a quick feel. Most likely, you came for the whole spectacular drive. Perhaps, too, you collect extremes, that litany of tallest, biggest, deepest, and wettest that justify so many of the National Parks. Redwood National Park does indeed contain the World's Tallest Tree (hereafter WTT), a little over 350 feet high. But if you want your own triumphal photograph of it, the joke is on you. If you're sharp, you may notice beforehand that nobody is selling postcard photos of the WTT, and wonder why.
To get to the WTT, you first go to the Ranger Station at Orick and get a permit and padlock combination to enter the protected area. Then, you drive up into the hills, enter the padlocked gate, and drive down a long gravel road to a parking lot. Then, you hike, further down, through deep, wet understory into the redwood grove. Finally, as you near the bottom, alongside a creek, you find a sign. "World's Tallest Tree", it says, with some statistics.
You look up. Like all the other trees around you, this one rises impressively but disappears into the canopy below the 100 foot level. You walk away a bit, look back. No use. Massive trunks rise everywhere you look, but you can't see very far up any of them. Finally, you keep your eye on the WTT and climb back up the trail a bit. Once you've gained 300 feet in altitude on the trail, you can tell yourself that you're now at the level of the top of the WTT, but as other redwoods creep up the slope all around you, you haven't a prayer of identifying which tree it is.
Coast Redwoods, you realize, have a different agenda than their mountain cousins, the Giant Sequoias. The latter live in mixed but fairly open stands in the Sierra Nevada. When they reach great age, they've usually fended off competing trees and cleared a large grand space for themselves. (One featured Giant Sequoia in Yosemite actually stands in the center of a long, straight trail, which opens into a circle around it much as the Champs Elysées parts for the Arc de Triomphe.) In short, Giant Sequoias behave the way National Park Attractions are meant to. They are big, grand, isolated from distracting surroundings, easy to see and photograph. They're the arboreal equivalent of Old Faithful, Mount Rainier or Utah's Arches, proudly on display for admiring crowds.
Coast Redwoods, by contrast, seem to be hiding. In fact, it is hard to imagine how a 300 foot tree could be less conspicuous. These tallest of the world's trees grow in thick stands in narrow, fog-prone valleys near the coast. In their native state, it is almost impossible to see one in its entirety, since their habit is to clump together, rising in many columns into a thick green canopy. More shade-tolerant than most trees, Coast Redwoods tend to keep more lower branches, so you can't expect to see very far into them. Only at their bases can you hope to distinguish one tree from another.
(In fact, if sheer verticality is what turns you on, come to Oregon and look at the old growth Douglas Firs. These trees have poor shade tolerance, so in old growth they are colossal bare pillars with just a bit of foliage way up at the top, the only place where they get enough sun. Douglas Firs don't get much taller than a puny 250 feet, but because of their habit, you're more likely to feel their size.)
So at some point, after you've tromped all around the WTT, trying to really see it, you give up. You'll just have to believe what the sign says. Maybe you get your picture taken next to the sign, with the base of the tree in the background, so you can say you've been there. Now what?
Now you can notice the quiet. This reservation system is great; if you come on a summer weekday, there's nobody here.
All around you are the great pillars of the ancient trees. Among them is a dense, wet, eternally shaded underbrush -- this is almost Oregon, remember -- pierced, if you're lucky, with the bright pink blooms of the native rhododendron. Gazing through the forest, you see a layer of green, out of which rise the sheer trunks only to disappear into another layer of green. The creek rushes nearby.
In drier redwood forests far to the south, such as Muir Woods near San Francisco, they use terms like "Cathedral Grove." Certainly, a cathedral can come to mind as you feel these huge structural pillars all around you, all soaring toward an invisible heaven. Perhaps too you hear a kind of benediction in all of the sounds of water. If you sense this, go with it. But the understory and the low canopy fuzz out the cathedral metaphor a bit -- as most things are blurred out in this wet region, even on the sunniest of days. In their happiest native site, where they reach world-record size, the redwoods would just as soon disappear. Give them fog, and rain, and a bit of sun, and they will rise together like a single being, hiding each other's enormity..
Recommended:
Yes
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