The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring-Fast Shipping

Description

Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California are thelargest and tallest organisms the world has ever sustained–the coast redwood trees,
Sequoia sempervirens. Ninety-six percent of the ancient redwood forests have beendestroyed by logging, but the untouched fragments that remain are among the greatwonders of nature. The biggest redwoods have trunks up to thirty feet wide and canrise more than thirty-five stories above the ground, forming cathedral-like structuresin the air.

Until recently, redwoods were thought to be virtually impossible to ascend,and the canopy at the tops of these majestic trees was undiscovered. In The WildTrees, Richard Preston unfolds the spellbinding story of Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine,and the tiny group of daring botanists and amateur naturalists that found a lostworld above California, a world that is dangerous, hauntingly beautiful, and unexplored.

The canopy
voyagers are young—just college students when they start their quest—andthey share a passion for these trees, persevering in spite of sometimes crushingpersonal obstacles and failings. They take big risks, they ignore common wisdom (suchas the notion that there’s nothing left to discover in North America), and they evenmake love in hammocks stretched between branches three hundred feet in the air.

The deep redwood canopy is a vertical Eden filled with mosses, lichens, spotted salamanders,hanging gardens of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry bushes, all growing out ofmassive trunk systems that have fused and formed flying buttresses, sometimes carvedinto blackened chambers, hollowed out by fire, called “fire caves.” Thick layersof soil sitting on limbs harbor animal and plant life that is unknown to move through the deep canopy suspended on ropes, far out of sight of the ground,knowing that the price of a small mistake can be a plunge to one’s death.

Preston’s account of this amazing world, by turns terrifying, moving, and fascinating, isan adventure story told in novelistic detail by a master of nonfiction author shares his protagonists’ passion for tall trees, and he mastered the techniquesof tall-tree climbing to tell the story in The Wild Trees—the story of the fate ofthe world’s most splendid forests and of the imperiled biosphere itself.