Redwood National and State Parks | How do the world’s tallest trees hold each other up?

Summary

A short written summary of the episode — not the full transcript. Press play above for the whole thing.

“Bro, it’s so big. It could fall over.” That is the first thing anybody said out loud at the base of an old-growth redwood, and it turns out to be the right question. Not how tall. How it stays up. “I can’t even see the top,” Big said. “My neck hurts already.”

A redwood can reach the height of a 35-story building on roots that go down ten to thirteen feet. Nothing about that should work. What holds the tree is sideways: roots running 60 to 80 feet out in every direction until they meet the neighbors’ roots and interlock, the way you take a kid’s hand on a slick trail. So wind pushing on one tree is also pushing the three trees holding on to it, and the nine holding those, and the twenty-seven holding those. Erika says it plainly. If you fall, I fall.

The forest keeps doing this at other sizes. Banana slugs eat the dead leaves, fallen branches and animal droppings, and turn it into soil that feeds young redwoods. They eat the plants competing with the seedlings. They never eat redwood. “So we can look, but don’t touch?” Little asked, and yes, because a slug breathes through its skin, and hand oil and soap make that hard.

The Yurok people managed this forest for thousands of years and almost never cut a standing redwood. They waited for a tree to fall, then carved the canoe and set a heart and lungs inside the hull, because the wood was still living. In 1850 gold turned up at Gold Bluffs Beach. Within a year settlers and state militias were destroying whole villages, and at least three-quarters of the Yurok people died.

Then four women, four different levers, one century. In 1924 Laura Perrott Mahan organized her neighbors, drove to an illegal cut and stood in front of the equipment while her husband filed emergency papers. Lady Bird Johnson used the one lever a first lady has, and the law creating Redwood National Park was signed in October 1968. Julia Butterfly Hill lived 180 feet up a thousand-year-old tree named Luna for 738 days, through helicopters and hired guards, until the logging company agreed to spare it. Amy Bowers Cordalis watched salmon die in the Klamath, went to law school, became the Yurok Tribe’s general counsel, and went after the four dams.

The dams came down in 2024. The salmon are moving up the Klamath again.