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.

Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

Big Kids Climb Big Trees:

Growing up, my nickname was "Monkey" for good reason. I loved climbing trees. To this day, I have trouble resisting grabbing low-hanging branches and hoisting myself into the canopy of a well-structured tree. My natural fear of heights seems to melt in the face of a good tree, no matter how high I climb. It's no surprise I was immediately excited when I discovered a book called Wild Trees, about the admirably insane people who string up ropes in ancient redwoods, "skywalking" from trunk to trunk, and take... more info

Needs a Ruthless Edit:

This book could easily have been edited in half, so much of it was irrelevant fluff. Yes there was a story to be told, but it was padded out with the prosaic details of it's subjects personal lives. Why would we want to know their golf handicaps, or what they have for breakfast? These people are interesting for the exceptional things they do, and where some context in their wider experiences would have added power and meaning to the story, Preston simply over does this, and actually weakens the story. more info

Wonderful Book!!:

Richard Preston has a way of making a scientific story come to life by bringing you into the lives of those who lived it. By far my favorite of all his I've read. This is now on my list of favorite books of all time. If you love trees, you'll be crazy about this book.

What a disappointment!:

I was expecting too much from this book and I was VERY disappointed. What I got was a mediocre, disjointed story of the activities and love lives of tree-climbing geeks looking for little more than the adventure of the climb and the search for the world's tallest tree.
I was expecting a book that better described what was found in their climbs. Where was the emotion? What did it look like? Where are the pictures for those of us who will never climb a redwood? Where was any sense of the majesty and awe... more info

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