Ruskin Hartley doesn't want to have to kill me, so he's not going to tell me.
Hartley, executive director of the Save the Redwoods League, is one of a tiny group of people privy to a secret that I - and quite a lot of other people - would dearly love to know: the location of the tallest tree on the planet.
Named Hyperion, it's a coastal redwood that soars 379 feet, 1.2 inches into the foggy North Coast sky. For comparison, stand on the corner of Fifth and Howard streets in San Francisco and crane your neck up at the new 32-story InterContinental Hotel. Put Hyperion next to it, and it would tower over the high-rise by 40 feet.
It was discovered less than two years ago, and its location was immediately hushed up. There are some very good reasons for this, as I came to learn, but still: Nature's tallest living skyscraper stands less than a day's drive from San Francisco, and it's only natural that people are going to want to go gawk at it.
Hartley unfolds a map and waves his hand over a region that covers half of Redwood National Park. Hyperion is somewhere in there, he says, but that's as specific as he is going to get.
Nevertheless, he agrees to accompany me to the North Coast to view some of the previous record holders, and, presumably, to steer me away should I inadvertently wander too close to the tallest of them all. By the time we finish, Hartley will have brought me around to his way of thinking: To obsess about one particular tree is to miss the point of redwood country. It's the forest that matters.
Vanishing empire
Coastal redwoods grow only in a narrow, foggy corridor from Big Sur to just over the Oregon border. They once covered 2 million acres of Northern California, but today fewer than 100,000 acres of old-growth forest remain - and that's only because of the intervention of a small group of enlightened people 90 years ago (see article "Saving redwoods a venerable institution").
On the ground, looking up, it's almost impossible to grasp how enormous these arboreal titans are. But I began to get an idea in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, in southern Humboldt County. There Ruskin introduced me to Dave Stockton, who grew up in a family of loggers but now runs the park's interpretive association. He seemed to be on a first-name basis with every tree in his park.
In Founders Grove, just off the Avenue of the Giants, Stockton led us to a fallen redwood reposing peacefully on the forest floor like a reclining Buddha. On its side, it was as tall as a house. It had broken into pieces, the largest of them longer than a city block. Together they contained a million pounds of lumber.
In 1991, the Dyerville Giant, as it is known, was thought to be the tallest tree in the world, topping out at 369.2 feet. And then, in a blustery March storm, it blew over, taking four other redwoods with it like toppling dominoes. The crash was so deafening that people in Weott, the nearest town, thought a freight train had derailed. It caused the needle to jump on a seismograph 10 miles away.
"When it went down," said Stockton, "it was like losing a member of the family." These days he rushes out after every big storm to reassure himself that the park's other giants are still standing.
In the state park, which straddles Highway 101, the voices of the visitors were Danish and Japanese and Texan; the license plates were from South Carolina, Colorado and even Germany. It was a reminder that redwoods are among the most beloved natural wonders of the world and that people will eagerly travel halfway around the globe to stand in awe of them. I'm always saddened and amazed by the number of Northern Californians who have never bothered.
One of the first of the big parks you come to as you drive north, Humboldt Redwoods is a wonderful introduction to redwood country. It has some of the tallest and most accessible trees on the North Coast, and, because it's sunnier and drier than other redwood parks, it is less tangled with undergrowth, making it easier to wander and see.
An ultrasecret giant
"The silence here is almost deafening," said Stockton as he led Hartley and me over, around and under a jumble of fallen redwoods near Bull Creek. He was taking us to the ultrasecret location of what until two years ago had been thought to be the world's tallest tree - a 370.5-foot behemoth known as the Stratosphere Giant.
You'd think it would be easy to spot the highest tree: Just step back from a grove and look for one that stands a head taller than the others, like a gangly fifth-grader in a class photo. But it's not that simple. For one, redwoods sometimes grow on slopes, making side-by-side comparisons difficult. Their canopies tend to cluster together and it's often hard to see what rises above, from any angle.
And the title of "world's tallest tree" is more fleeting than you'd expect. Three different coastal redwoods have held it since 2000; it seems to change hands every few years. A more accurate title would be "the world's tallest known tree at this moment."
Two amateur naturalists, Michael Taylor and Chris Atkins, have spent the past decade canvassing the redwood forests of the North Coast in search of unknown giants, and they have found dozens. They've pretty well completed their survey, and experts now say it's unlikely any more record holders await discovery. But champions topple over, their uppermost crowns die or are blow off in storms, and redwoods inch skyward at different rates - anywhere from 1 to 5 inches a year. It's likely that within a few years a new champion will be crowned.
But why all the secrecy about its location? For all their size and longevity, redwoods are fragile. This was driven home in 2000, when the location of the "world's tallest tree" at the time, the Mendocino Giant, leaked out. Thousands of people descended on Montgomery Woods State Reserve near Ukiah to gaze up in wonder and give it a hug - so many that they compressed the delicate soil around its roots, possibly damaging the tree.
Since then, biologists have made a pact not to reveal the locations of the tallest redwoods, and some have come to regret the practice of giving them headline-grabbing names.
"Well," said Stockton as I stood up and dusted the loam of the forest floor off my shirt, "here we are."
I stared dumbly at the enormous bases of a dozen redwoods.
"So, uh ... which one's Stratosphere?" I finally asked.
Gazing up to where their canopies converged, there was no way to tell which was tallest, or even that any of them was a record-setter.
As redwoods go, the Stratosphere Giant is not going to win any beauty contests. Gnarly and asymmetrical, its lower trunk bears the scars of past fires. It's not decrepit or noble enough for "old man of the forest" status; rather, it looks like it reached middle age and just let itself go. Trust me: It's not worth seeking out, and please don't ask me for directions. I couldn't find it again if had to.
But as we made our way back toward the trail, I began to feel a tangible sense of reverence and piety as we passed through one beatific cluster of trees after another. Likening a redwood grove to a cathedral is one of the most shopworn cliches in the book, but there's just no escaping it.
With their stately columns soaring heavenward, their unearthly silence and the muted sunlight slanting in from above - photographers call these "God rays" - redwood forests are palpably spiritual places, even for atheists like me.
"It's the unity and symmetry of the forest, and the sense of continuity," Stockton said. "You're making an emotional connection to deep time and the immortality of life."
Many of these living cathedrals, it's worth remembering, are older than Chartres or Notre Dame; some are older than Christianity itself.
The oldest of these coastal redwoods may have been alive when Cleopatra walked the Earth, but it wasn't until recently that biologists began to realize that a lost world exists high in their branches. (See sidebar.)
Primordial landscape
One morning, Hartley and I drove up the dirt-and-gravel Howland Hill Road into Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park near Crescent City (Del Norte County). The mossy and dripping forest there is lush, green and filled with salmonberry bushes and enormous, primordial-looking ferns.
"You can go places here and feel like the only person who's ever been there," Hartley said. "I know respected scientists who step off the trail and say they expect to be tapped on the shoulder by a dinosaur."
This is the southern limit of the temperate rain forest that stretches north to Alaska, and the contrast with the sunnier and drier Humboldt Redwoods State Park is stark. It's a reminder that if you've seen one redwood park, you haven't seen them all: Each has its own personality.
Later that day, Hartley got a special permit and the combination to a locked gate in Redwood National Park - anyone can do this; see "If You Go" - and we drove to the parking lot for the hike to the park's birthplace - the Tall Trees Grove.
In 1963, as logging companies mowed down old-growth redwood forests as quickly as their chain saws could cut, National Geographic magazine sent a biologist-explorer, Paul Zaul, into the area in search of extraordinarily tall redwoods. Along the gravelly banks of Redwood Creek, he discovered a tree that soared 367.8 feet above the forest floor.
The magazine, forgoing its usually exhaustive fact checking, immediately proclaimed it the world's tallest tree; Zaul, demonstrating that the art of naming redwoods still had a long way to go, racked his brain for something catchy and came up with "the Tall Tree."
The discovery helped establish Redwood National Park in 1968. It has since been expanded and connected to the adjacent Prairie Creek Redwoods and Jedediah Smith Redwood state parks to form the Redwood National and State Parks, which functions as a single entity.
As Hartley and I descended the steep, mile-long trail, I intended to have a look at Zaul's Tall Tree. (Hyperion is at an undisclosed location elsewhere in the park, as if it were in the witness protection program.)
But by the time we reached the grove, I was again overwhelmed by the ethereal beauty of the forest, by the fragrant duff beneath my feet, by the timeless pillars rising into the sky, by the knowledge that a tiny Garden of Eden existed hundreds of feet above our heads.
We ate our sandwiches in reverent silence, and we were halfway back to the car before I realized I'd forgotten to go gawk at the Tall Tree. It didn't matter. Sorry to lay another hoary old cliche on you, but it wasn't until I got past my obsession with size that I was finally able to see the redwood forest for the trees.
Five cool things about redwoods
1. Coastal redwoods can grow from a seedling to 100 feet in 50 years. They continue to grow, albeit at a slower rate, until they die. This can be as long as 2,200 years.
2. The only place outside California and southern Oregon where redwoods grow in the wild is China. The dawn redwood was thought long extinct, but was found growing in remote valleys in Sichuan in the 1940s.
3. Ronald Reagan never actually said, "If you've seen one redwood tree you've seen them all." What he said to the Western Wood Products Association in 1966 was: "You know, a tree is a tree. How many more do you need to look at?" The following year he said of redwood trees: "There is nothing beautiful about them, just that they are a little higher than the others."
4. There are a few dozen "albino" redwoods in Northern California with a genetic mutation that prevents them from producing chlorophyll.
5. A section of Humboldt Redwoods State Park has the highest concentration of "biomass" - living and dead organic material - ever measured on the planet, higher even than the Amazon rain forest.
If you go
GETTING THERE
Just get onto Highway 101, the Redwood Highway, and point your car north. If you haven't driven the road in a decade or two, you'll be pleasantly surprised that it has been improved dramatically. From San Francisco, it's about four hours to Weott in Humboldt County and Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Crescent City and Jedediah Smith Redwood State Park are about 6 1/2 hours away. Other parks are in between.
WHERE TO STAY
The 84-year-old Requa Inn, on the banks of the Klamath River just outside Klamath, is the best place to stay for many miles in any direction. The rooms (antiques, clawfoot tubs) all have private baths, and the owners have perfected the delicate balance between conviviality and privacy. $89-$169, including an excellent breakfast. (866) 800-8777, www.requainn.com.
The only accommodation inside Redwood National Park is the Redwood Hostel, (707) 482-8265, www.redwoodhostel.org. Open daily March to October; limited availability in winter. Beds start at $21 per night.
For choices in Humboldt County, visit that county's convention and visitors bureau Web site (below).
WHERE TO EAT
Near Humboldt Redwoods State Park on Avenue of the Giants, the Groves Restaurant in Myers Flat offers wood-fired pizzas and other treats. Dinner daily except Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Adjacent to the Riverwood Cellars tasting room, on a nice bend of the Eel River with plenty of pretty redwood groves nearby. Entrees $20-36. (707) 943-9930; No address (Myers Flat is a very small town.)
Also near Humboldt Redwoods, the Riverwood Inn in Phillipsville is the last of the old roadhouses on old Highway 101. Good Mexican food, with entrees $7-$18. 2828 Avenue of the Giants, www.riverwoodinn.info, (707) 943-1930.
Near Redwood National Park in Orick, Hog Wild is a true biker bar - check out the burn marks on the floor - but the cooked-to-order food is surprisingly good. Entrees $8-$20. On Highway 101, www.gethawgwild.com, (707) 488.2728.
WHAT TO DO
With a few exceptions, such as Fern Grove in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, most of the redwood parks do not charge entry fees.
For the hike to the Tall Trees Grove, you must obtain a permit and combination to the locked gate in person, the day of your hike, at the Redwood National Park Visitors Center on Highway 101 in Orick. Open daily 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. (until 5 p.m. after Labor Day.) www.nps.gov/redw/, (707) 465-7765. Only 50 people a day are allowed in the grove, but the quota is rarely reached.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Humboldt County Convention and Visitors Bureau, www.redwoods.info, (800) 346-3482.
Save the Redwoods League, www.savetheredwoods.org, (415) 362-2352.San Francisco Chronicle
