Musings

Back Among The Giants

Our recent Christmas in Northern California included another trip to see redwood trees, this time to the Avenue of the Giants. It never fails to awe me to see these almost incomprehensible trees. I am hardly what you would call a tree-hugger, but I have been fascinated with these giant tees ever since the episode on Then Came Bronson titled “The Forest Primeval.”

I found the wind of this trunk simply amazing. It is one thing to see this twisting on a tree trunk that is one, two, or even three feet in diameter. But fifteen feet? Wow.

If I remember the sign correctly, this tree was the largest living thing on Earth when it came down in 1991. It was almost 400 feet tall and weighed more than a million pounds, and the root buttress was approximately 30 by 60 feet. For scale, the tree trunk on the right side of the image is about two feet in diameter.

Now That’s a burl!