Backpacker Magazine – June 2007

Above & Beyond

The world's tallest tree towers above a secret location deep within the lush, tangled backcountry of Redwood National Park. Determined to find this giant, our correspondent discovers something more incredible than he ever imagined.

by: Tom Clynes, Photos by Mark Katzman

Tags:
• Nature
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• California
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• Destinations
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• Weekends
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Normally I wouldn't let a few downed trees get in the way of a good bushwhack. But as I surveyed the wall of redwood trunks lying across the creek that had been my pathway into the mountains, I had to consider the possibility that I had met my match. Each of these trees was at least 10 feet in diameter, and more than 250 feet long. Piled up like pick-up sticks hurled by a livid giant, the fallen trunks created a formidable barrier to further ascent.

My two companions and I sat down on mossy rocks to assess the situation. Going over the wall of wood was likely impossible without climbing gear, which is not allowed in the park. Going under might have worked, had we brought along snorkels and wetsuits. Going around would entail a battle with head-high nettles that ran up and down the 50 percent grade at creekside. From recent experience, we knew that the climb could take hours, and several pints of our blood.

We had come to this remote basin in northern California's Redwood National Park to hunt for the world's tallest living tree, a coast redwood nearly 380 feet in height. Explorers had discovered it last summer, in a remnant stand of old growth in the southern section of the park. Growing quietly on a mountainside for centuries, the newly crowned giant is some 70 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty, or about as tall as a 40-story building. Its discoverers christened it Hyperion, after the Titan (of Greek mythology) who fathered the sun.

The news was followed, as these things must be nowadays, by a press release. Emailed from the tourism people in Humboldt County, the message claimed that Hyperion "is too far from any trail to visit." But, it consoled, "adventurers piqued by the discovery have plenty of other opportunities to explore old-growth redwood groves in Humboldt County, the tallest, largest and most pristine in the world."

Having spent time in Humboldt, I knew the superlatives were well-deserved. But among my several inveterate weaknesses is an attraction to extremes. I'm a sucker for the biggest and tallest and fastest, the superjumbo jets and Everests and top-fuel dragsters. I hit the reply button and typed a message to Richard Stenger, author of the press release. "Why couldn't an ambitious backpacker visit Hyperion?" I asked.

A few minutes later, Stenger was on the phone. "I gotta tell you," he said, "this one is really off the beaten path. They say it's on an incredibly steep slope with thick underbrush that you'd have to bushwhack through, if you knew where to go. But the park folks aren't telling anyone where it is. Everyone who knows anything about this tree is sworn to secrecy."All of which sounded, to me, like a pretty good challenge. And so a few weeks later, I found myself driving up the Redwood Highway with photographer Mark Katzman and photo assistant Derek Southard. From San Francisco north to the Oregon border, California's coastal population thins out and the forests and fogs thicken. Lacking good harbors, far-northern California had little to grip the roots of settlers. Fortune-seekers came and moved on, following the boom-and-bust cycles of the gold rush and the timber stampede.

We overnighted in Eureka, 225 miles north of San Francisco. There, in an Irish pub, Katzman revealed that he was less than confident about our mission. "So we're just going to show up," he asked, "with no credentials and no notice, and try to find this tree that no one wants us to find?"
That was essentially the plan–although I had put a call in to the park's interpretive specialist, Jim Wheeler. Chief ranger Pat Grediagin was supposedly the only Park Service employee who knew the exact location of Hyperion. The New Yorker had quoted Grediagin as saying "there's been a lot of talk about this discovery. I'm just worried that someone will get a wild idea to try to find this tree."

That would be us. But I reassured Wheeler, on a drizzly Thursday morning when we met him at park headquarters in the town of Orick, that ours was a responsible quest. If we managed to find the tree, I told Wheeler, we wouldn't reveal its location, either in print or in conversation. But Wheeler, and the other rangers we would meet, didn't seem overly concerned about our intentions.

"Mostly," Wheeler shrugged, "nobody around here thinks you have any chance of finding it."

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