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In the space of eight weeks last summer, Michael Taylor and fellow amateur naturalist Chris Atkins, 44, discovered what are believed to be the three tallest trees in the world, all of them higher than 370 feet and as much as 2,200 years old. The discoverers christened them Helios, after the Greek sun god, Hyperion, his father, and Icarus, the mythological youth whose wings melted when he flew too close to the sun. Separately and as a team, Atkins and Taylor are credited with cataloguing more extreme trees—those measuring 350 feet and up—than anyone else. Yet until they located the new champions in Redwood National Park, 90 miles north of here, their achievement was unappreciated outside a tiny fraternity of similarly obsessed scientists and enthusiasts. Now, after years of tracking trees as a hobby and at their own expense, the men are months away from completing their quest to measure all the loftiest redwoods. They know where California’s last unexplored stands are, and by next summer they expect to have canvassed them all. The odds of finding a tree taller than the 379.1-foot Hyperion are less than 1 percent, they say. Coast redwoods grow in a 470-mile ribbon from southern Oregon to Big Sur, and routinely top 300 feet, or the height of a 30-story building. Only 36 coast redwoods taller than 360 feet have been recorded. Atkins or Taylor had a hand in locating 28 of them. In the 370-feet-and-up category, there are only four. Atkins and Taylor found them all. Source: Associated Press
In the space of eight weeks last summer, Michael Taylor and fellow amateur naturalist Chris Atkins, 44, discovered what are believed to be the three tallest trees in the world, all of them higher than 370 feet and as much as 2,200 years old. The discoverers christened them Helios, after the Greek sun god, Hyperion, his father, and Icarus, the mythological youth whose wings melted when he flew too close to the sun. Separately and as a team, Atkins and Taylor are credited with cataloguing more extreme trees—those measuring 350 feet and up—than anyone else.
Yet until they located the new champions in Redwood National Park, 90 miles north of here, their achievement was unappreciated outside a tiny fraternity of similarly obsessed scientists and enthusiasts. Now, after years of tracking trees as a hobby and at their own expense, the men are months away from completing their quest to measure all the loftiest redwoods. They know where California’s last unexplored stands are, and by next summer they expect to have canvassed them all. The odds of finding a tree taller than the 379.1-foot Hyperion are less than 1 percent, they say. Coast redwoods grow in a 470-mile ribbon from southern Oregon to Big Sur, and routinely top 300 feet, or the height of a 30-story building. Only 36 coast redwoods taller than 360 feet have been recorded. Atkins or Taylor had a hand in locating 28 of them. In the 370-feet-and-up category, there are only four. Atkins and Taylor found them all.
Source: Associated Press
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