The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring | 
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Product Description
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.
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Customer Reviews:
• Inspired Us To Marry In A Redwood Grove 17 August, 2008
This is a really wonderful book. Rather than repeat all the accolades and special details, I'll just relay my personal experience.
My then-girlfriend and I read this book together in the summer of 2007 and fell in love with the book and the people and the trees. It inspired us to seek a redwood grove to get married in.
On August 2, 2008, we were married inside an ancient, living redwood tree hollowed out by fire. It was a small, intimate ceremony - we and our 14 invited guests fit inside the tree with room to spare. We had a fantastic time!
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3NBF49Y7T8OXD
• Skip This One 01 August, 2008
Unless you really really really love botany and tree climbing, I'd skip this one. Instead I recommend 'The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed' by John Vaillant.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A28N2AWOVO2PB
• I Can't Tell A Redwood From A Dogwood And I Still Loved It 14 July, 2008
I got this book as a gift and was non-plussed. A whole book about people climbing trees? But once I started I couldn't put it down. Terrific writing, great characters and a really compelling story to tell. It was almost enough to make me want to go climb a tree myself. The only complaint I have is that I would have loved to see a few more sketches, or a few pictures, or something to really make plain just how large the trees are for those of us who can't just head off to California to see for ourselves.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3TK4GIFAHVE1H
• Editing Is Lacking An Otherwise Impressive Story Idea 21 September, 2008
Loved the content but found the style of writing to be better suited to essays. This booked seems like it was rushed to print before Preston had come up with a suitable way to tell this story. When it gets to the part where he is involved directly with the characters it is more coherent but the chapters that tell the story of each character is better as a stand alone essay. It just seems like a book that is half baked....not crazy...just not ready. Where was the editor?
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2IDP3M4APU2G2
• A Very Dull Book On A Fascinating Subject. 10 October, 2008
As a Certified Arborist, I was very eager to read this book. I spend most of my working hours aloft, in trees, so this book was right up my alley (tree). Unfortunately, the author's lack of interesting character development and a rambling narrative style made me not like this book, at all. It was tough to make it through. Indeed, what little character development there was made me dislike most of the climbers in this book. I was especially annoyed with the individuals who illegally climbed the big trees as younger men and then, once they had made some measurements and published a few scientific papers on that subject, soon became reactionary elitists who kept the trees to themselves and their colleagues via secret maps and such. What a bunch of garbage. Yes, only they (conveniently) deemed themselves worthy of climbing the tall trees. Also, as a skilled rope climber these past many years, I found myself laughing out loud at the terms this author used to describe well known climbing techniques. Double crotching became "sky walking," lanyard ropes/second lines became "spider lines" and other such silliness. In all fairness, since the author is a recreational climber it is fairly obvious that he is using the terms that he learned from his climbing instructors. Those instructors saw a way to cash in on the public's interest in tree climbing and so they took the techniques from the pros and gave them their own more romantic/picturesque names. Another annoying thing is that the true pioneers in our business are missing, entirely, from this book. A reader of this book, new to tree climbing, would think that climbing began in the 1980's with the rec climbing movement. In reality, professional arborists and big timber workers have been roping their way up trees before that. It would have been nice to see some of the true climbing pioneers like Beranek and his contemporaries mentioned in this book. All in all this book was a disappointing, boring read.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3CSB6EGX7D2Q9
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