Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern
California are the largest and tallest organisms the world has ever
sustained-the coast redwood trees, " "Sequoia sempervirens.
Ninety-six percent of the ancient redwood forests have been
destroyed by logging, but the untouched fragments that remain are
among the great wonders of nature. The biggest redwoods have trunks
up to thirty feet wide and can rise more than thirty-five stories
above the ground, forming cathedral-like structures in 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 Wild Trees," Richard Preston unfolds the
spellbinding story of Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and the tiny
group of daring botanists and amateur naturalists that found a lost
world above California, a world that is dangerous, hauntingly
beautiful, and unexplored.
The canopy voyagers are young-just college students when they start
their quest-and they share a passion for these trees, persevering
in spite of sometimes crushing personal obstacles and failings.
They take big risks, they ignore common wisdom (such as the notion
that there's nothing left to discover in North America), and they
even make 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 of massive trunk
systems that have fused and formed flying buttresses, sometimes
carved into blackened chambers, hollowed out by fire, called "fire
caves." Thick layers of soil sitting on limbs harbor animal and
plant life that is unknown to science. Humans 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, is an adventure story told in novelistic
detail by a master of nonfiction narrative. The author shares his
protagonists' passion for tall trees, and he mastered the
techniques of tall-tree climbing to tell the story in "The Wild
Trees"-the story of the fate of the world's most splendid forests
and of the imperiled biosphere itself.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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