The Wild Trees

This book, by Richard Preston, is worth buying, reading and passing along.  "The Wild Trees" is a love story of sorts about huge redwood trees, mostly in northern California, along the coast.  A small group of adventurous young men and women decided to find the tallest tree in the world and climb it.  It's a great story, a short book, an easy read and incredibly informative.  

In Humboldt county there are stands of redwood trees that have been almost unexplored and their location is a guarded secret.  These trees are thousands of years old and have their own tree culture. Until these climbers ascended into the redwoods, no one knew what was at the top of the trees: canopies thick enough to walk on, small gardens of bonsai buckeye trees growing in soil 350 feet above the ground, salamanders and insects not found anywhere else except at the top of the trees. Redwoods have been on the earth for over 60  million years, have survived the climate that killed off the dinosaurs. 

This book was written 8 years ago so it is easy to find in paperback, or get it out of the library. You can read it in a couple of days and it will make you want to get in your car and visit a redwood grove.  It's a very fine book.