The World Three Hundred Feet Up

Now look up again, and let me tell you what nobody knew until about thirty years ago — because until climbers got serious ropes into these crowns in the nineteen nineties, the tops of these trees were genuinely unexplored.

What they found up there is a second forest. Where big limbs meet the trunk, dead needles and bark collect in the crotches and rot down over centuries into actual SOIL — mats of it, sometimes a metre deep, three hundred feet above the ground. And things grow in that soil. Not moss: full ferns, huckleberry bushes with edible berries, even other trees — hemlocks and small redwoods rooted in the canopy of a bigger redwood.

And animals live there permanently. There's a salamander — the wandering salamander — that completes its entire life cycle up in those crowns and never once touches the ground. Flying squirrels. Insects science hadn't described. Whole small ecosystems, hanging in the air.

The trees themselves are strange up top too. An old redwood doesn't have one neat spire; it has a crown that has been struck by lightning, snapped by storms, and regrown into a candelabra of reiterated trunks — essentially a grove of trees growing out of one tree.

So when you glance up through the windshield and see nothing but a green ceiling, understand: there's a whole country up there, and we only met it a generation ago.