A ten-second Redwood.
Redwoods were the first trees I had ever seen where the story was the trunk, not the leaves. In fact, it took me a few sightings to realize that there are no leaves (at least not on the Coast Redwood conifers, which is the species I’m most familiar with. Thank you, Laurea and the state of California). When you’re drawing the Fastest Possible Tallest Possible Tree on a tiny card, the way you do it is to tell that story, which has the added benefit of saving a lot of time on the branches.
The two tiny people at the bottom would be Laurea and I. We’re hiking out to Sykes Hot Springs in Big Sur, and you can see here that we are only an hour or so in, because you don’t encounter the branches (let alone the tender upper canopy) of the redwood forest until you’ve hiked an arduous seven hours up sun-baked hills and down through wet, shrouded valleys. It’s a hike I’d recommend you take, but the only way I can demonstrate the dizzying height of the Fastest Possible Redwood is to give you a happy little picture of the two of us before we started asking the questions:
- “Should we be seeing the tops of these trees?
- “How many days before we can stop?”
- “Did you really only bring eleven Clif Bars and two Cup Ramens to sustain us?”
Yes, the Redwoods are at their best when you are at the bottom, but to see the top is a rare treat. It’ll take you 2500 times longer for you to do that than it took to draw this picture, but it’s nearly as fun.
