Many say size doesn’t matter, but when it comes to trees, size really does set them apart. That’s what this team of three researchers thought when they came across a massive sugar pine tree in Yosemite National Park. As it turns out, they had stumbled upon the largest pine tree in the world.
“It was all by itself in the forest,” the self-taught forester Michael Taylor told SFGATE. “Really, in a league of its own.”
Big tree hunters. Taylor is known as a “big tree hunter” because he’s dedicated to finding just that: big trees. In fact, he’s pretty good at it. Taylor was part of the two-person team who discovered the world’s tallest tree, a coast redwood located in California’s Redwood National Park called “Hyperion,” in 2006. Hyperion is 380 feet tall, or 1.25 times bigger than the Statue of Liberty.
Taylor also discovered the second- and third-largest trees in Redwood National Park, known as “Helios” and “Icarus” in a nod to Greek mythology. Both are 377 feet and 371 feet tall, respectively.
“When you find a tall or big tree, it generates excitement. It opens a lot of people’s eyes,” Taylor said in an interview in October. “People want to protect it, so it can get people to buy the land and protect these trees.”
The role of lidar technology. Taylor uses lidar technology, which stands for light detection and ranging, to study forests. Lidar uses light from pulsed lasers to measure variable distances to the Earth. With lidar, researchers can create accurate 3D maps of the environment, allowing them to analyze the size, number, and health of trees.
The Mossy Creek Giant. The story behind how Taylor and researchers Carl Casey and Martin Crawford found the world’s largest tree was decades in the making. As told by SFGATE, Taylor first saw the tree while on a high school camping trip in 1981. At that time, he thought it was “the biggest sugar pine I ever found,” but didn’t do more than make a mental note of its location.
In August of this year, more than 40 years later, Taylor was visiting Yosemite with Casey and Crawford on the search for a different tree he had seen on lidar maps. However, he found that access to the tree was blocked inside the park. As an alternative, he told his fellow big tree hunters they should check out the sugar pine from years ago.
When they reached the Mossy Creek Giant, the three quickly realized that perhaps there was something out of the ordinary about the tree’s size. After taking some measurements and making calculations, they determined that the tree had a volume of 5,761 cubic feet and was between 450 and 500 years old. It stands at 236 feet tall.
Click on the photo to go to the Instagram post.
A secret location. Upon reflection, Taylor says his experience seeing the Mossy Creek Giant in high school is what inspired him to start studying big trees. Not just anyone will be able to recreate the experience, though: The location of notable trees like the Mossy Creek Giant generally aren’t released to the public. This is done to protect the trees, as visitors can sometimes cause unintentional harm.
Taylor isn’t done looking for big trees. He’s currently working with the Pacific Forest Trust on a project to identify the 50 tallest trees of each of California’s 10 tree species.
Image | Jesse Gardner
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