Status-Q

Today I drove down through northern California. And there’s something that everyone says you should do when you’re driving through northern California: go and see the giant redwoods.

Now, I was interested in doing this, but mostly just to make a change from the other scenery I’d been driving through this week. After all, I had seen some pretty big redwoods elsewhere, and, dash it, we have some rather substantial oaks back at home. Still, it was only a small detour, so I turned off Highway 101 into the ‘Avenue of the Giants’.

And I was awestruck.

I mean, I knew they were big: I’d seen pictures since childhood of the ones you can drive cars through. And other friends and family had taken photos on previous visits, which might look something like this:

or this:

or this:

But I think I’d never really caught on to just how staggeringly large these things are because, compared to most other species, they are remarkably tall for their width, and that’s very hard to capture in photos. You can put things near the bottom of them, like people, or my small rental car:

But that only shows you the scale of the very bottom bit of the tree.

But to give you an indication, this is Founders’ Tree (admittedly taken with a wide-angle lens):

Now, this fellow is over 12 ft across, which is pretty impressive… but it’s over 346 ft high! If, like me, you find the raw numbers hard to grasp, that’s taller than the Statue of Liberty or Big Ben. It’s over twice the height of Niagara Falls; in fact, you have to go noticeably higher than Niagara before you get to the first branch.

These trees are, quite literally, awesome.

And yet, put a few of them together, let them grow for a millennium or so, and you get a remarkably peaceful and beautiful place.

If you get a chance to see them, do so.