Michael Taylor is a big-game hunter. But the prey he's spent more than half his life pursuing doesn't have legs or even a heartbeat.
Instead, armed with a laser range finder, a head for numbers and an explorer's zeal, 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's found record-setting redwoods in the past. "And it was pretty much unexplored."
In the space of eight weeks last summer, he and frequent hunting partner and fellow amateur naturalist Chris Atkins, discovered what are believed to be the three tallest trees in the world.
Separately and as a team, Atkins and Taylor are credited with cataloguing more extreme trees -- those measuring 350 feet and up -- 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.
They christened them Helios, after the Greek sun god; Hyperion, his father; and Icarus, the mythological youth whose makeshift wings melted when he flew too close to the sun.
Now, after years of tracking trees as a hobby and on their own dimes, the men are months away from completing their quest to measure all the loftiest redwoods. They know where California's last unexplored stands are, and by next summer, they expect to have canvassed them all. The odds of finding a tree taller than the 379.1-foot Hyperion are less than 1 percent, they say.
"It will leave a void," says Atkins, 44.
To put what they do in perspective, it helps to know that the tallest tree species after the redwood, the Douglas fir and the Sitka spruce, rarely top 300 feet, the height of a 29-story building.
Coast redwoods, which grow in a 470-mile ribbon from southern Oregon to Big Sur, routinely get that tall, and taller, and can live 2,000 years or more. (The giant sequoia, the redwood's beefy inland cousin, are the biggest trees by volume.)
Nevertheless, only 36 examples 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.
Their stalking grounds are forests where, to the untrained eye, one quiet giant looks pretty much like the next. Yet if you know how to spot them, a prize is as likely to be within sight of a popular trail or highway as hidden in an untouched grove.
A trunk that takes its time tapering, level ground, proximity to water, a flash of sun-kissed foliage reaching beyond the veil of shaded canopy -- these are clues for finding a truly towering tree that stands out from its merely magnificent neighbors.
On a recent afternoon, Taylor spots a contender glowing like copper in the last slant of sun. Backing up for a better angle, he peers through the range finder, steadies his aim, and fires.
No cigar. Getting a reading amid a cluster of trunks as wide as mobile homes proves difficult. Taylor lowers his scope and bushwhacks uphill for another try.
"See how frustrating this can be?" he calls over his shoulder, swatting aside wet ferns and clambering over downed branches. "I can see the top, but I can't hit it."
The men, who also share a passion for Dungeons & Dragons and The Lord of the Rings, freely admit that one reason they've emerged as champion tall-tree hunters is because there was little competition for the title.
For more than 30 years, the tallest known redwood was a 367.8-foot specimen National Geographic Society scientist Paul Zahl found in 1963. Zahl wrote about "Finding the Mt. Everest of Living Things," and his work gave momentum to an effort to preserve the remaining old-growth redwood forests. The terrain he covered became Redwood National Park in 1968.
It wasn't until Taylor, a kindred spirit named Ron Hildebrant and a budding botanist named Steve Sillett started compiling a list of trees over 340 feet in the late 1980s that anyone thought to challenge Zahl's discovery.
"No one was out there looking for the trees or seemed to really care," Taylor says.
It turned out, however, that Tall Tree had lost more than nine feet in the years between its discovery -- possibly due to weather, disease or the compacting of the soft soil around its trunk by the landmark's many visitors. Sillett eventually remeasured it by climbing to the top and dropping a tape measure to the ground.
In 1995, another redwood Zahl found, called National Geographic Tree, was declared the new champ at 365.5 feet. It would be several more years before the National Park Service updated its signs accordingly.
The discovery galvanized members of the Tall Trees Club, founded by Taylor and Sillett. Their goal of systematically exploring groves most likely to yield behemoths was made much easier in 1995, when a handheld laser range finder originally developed for the military was marketed to the public.
With a few clicks, the device could calculate an object's height based on readings of its distance and the angle to the top. It accomplished in seconds what had taken all day using old-fashioned surveying instruments and good math skills.
In December 1996, the crown changed branches again after Taylor discovered the 367.5-foot Mendocino Tree in an unlikely place: Montgomery Woods State Reserve, a small, little-known park 250 miles south of Redwood National Park. It held the record until August 2000, when Atkins found a 370.4-foot monster he named Stratosphere Giant.
At times, the pair have been hard-pressed to explain their hobby to friends and family. Taylor, who ekes out a living selling silver on eBay, says his parents were "horrified" he wanted to rank redwoods instead of make money until the discoveries of Helios and Hyperion got media attention.
"I was always really fascinated with the extremes -- the biggest elephant, the longest anaconda," he says. "Why? I don't know."
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.Associated Press via Santa Fe New Mexican
