TALL TALES
B
ill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods,
in which he describes hiking the
2,200-mile Appalachian Trail, from
Maine to Georgia, is one of my favourite
travel books. Not just because Bryson is
the funniest travel writer alive today — a
man who, in that book, describes a moose
as ‘a cow drawn by a three-year-old’ and his
plan for a bear attack as ‘[to] literally shit
myself lifeless’ — but because I also love
how it celebrates my favourite landscape:
forests. Oceans are wild, but unattainable.
Mountains impressive, but daunting. Forests,
however, are diferent.
Which is lucky, because America is illed
with some of the greatest in the world.
I’ve seen aspens turn gold in the Rocky
Mountains, and New England oaks blaze a
ire red. I’ve walked among the Joshua trees
of the Mojave Desert — strange, spiky things
that look like they’ve been drawn by Dr Seuss
— and, in Nevada, glimpsed the gnarled
bark of the Great Basin bristlecone pine, the
oldest of which had their roots in the ground
at the same time as the irst stones of the
Egyptian pyramids were laid.
But of all of America’s trees, one is
surely king: the great sequoia. John Muir,
the 19th-century Scottish-American
environmentalist, called this Californian
giant the ‘god of the woods’. Stretching
hundreds of feet into the sky, with reddish-
brown bark and blankets of evergreen
needles, it’s the world’s largest tree by
volume; growing as tall as a 27-storey
building and as wide as a double-decker bus.
Sequoias exist only in a narrow band
of elevation on the western side of the
Sierra Nevada mountains, with the biggest
found in Sequoia National Park and Kings
Canyon National Park. It was only when I
visited that I realised what a spectacular
place it is. This is the back door to Yosemite
National Park, home to soaring granite
peaks, black bears and alpine meadows
bursting with wildlowers. The hiking is
superb, there’s world-class rock climbing,
and even an enormous marble cavern called
the Crystal Cave.
But the trees are the main reason people
come here, and the best place to see them
is the Sequoia National Park’s Giant Forest.
Historic, huge and humbling, California’s giant sequoias are
a powerful reminder of the importance of forestsILLUSTRATION: JACQUI OAKLEYRemember that ’80s ilm, Honey, I Shrunk the
Kids, where a bunch of teenagers are reduced
to the size of ants by their amateur scientist
dad? It’s like that. I walked fully upright
through fallen, hollowed out sequoias,
craned my neck as I strolled through groves
of wood colossi, and, yes, I’m not too proud
to admit it, I tree-hugged too. Well, I tried,
at least. It would take 10 of me, stretched
ingertip to ingertip, to reach all the way
around even the smallest tree here.
The biggest is General Sherman — the
largest living thing on Earth. It’s hard to
visualise 52,000 cubic feet, so let’s just say,
if it were a hot tub, you could share it with
1,000 friends and still have room to wiggle.
If it were a keg, it would hold over three
million pints of beer. I walked around its
enormous trunk, 103t in circumference,
soaring 275t high, like a skyscraper of bark
and leaf, and hardly believed it was real.
Fossil records suggest giant sequoias date
back to the time of the dinosaurs — giants
from a time of giants. Humbling, inspiring
and hard to comprehend.
Forests have the remarkable power to
make you stop and think. Bryson wrote:
‘Woods are not like other spaces... they
make you feel small and confused and
vulnerable, like a small child lost in a
crowd of strange legs.’ And that’s how it
feels among the giant sequoias.
But woods are also somehow comforting,
relaxing and, most importantly, alive.
Deserts and mountains are ecosystems
where life exists; here, life simply is. You can
feel it. You can sense the Earth breathing,
springing and soaring into the sky.
Studies have shown that simply looking
at pictures of trees is enough to reduce
stress levels. Forest bathing — wandering
mindfully among the woods — is one of
the latest wellness trends. We haven’t
evolved to live in cities, I thought as I stared
up at these gods of the woods. We’ve evolved
to live here among the trees. Perhaps it’s
time we all went for a walk in the woods.
visitcalifornia.comBritish travel writer Aaron Millar ran away from London
in 2013 and has been hiding out in Boulder, Colorado
ever since. @AaronMWriterSMART TRAVELLERVIEW FROM THE USA // AARON MILLAR
50 nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel