ACROSS A STEEP CANYON, a ghost floats in the
darkness—a phantom in this redwood forest,
somewhere in California’s Santa Cruz County.
We slip-slide into the gully, landing in spongy
piles of discarded needles, ferns, and poison oak,
and then we scale the other slope. A great horned
owl hoots once, twice, three times. Dawn is just
beginning to tickle the treetops, but down here,
beneath the forest canopy, it’s still chilly twilight.
A few feet away, the astonishingly white tree
hovers like an otherworldly apparition, its crown
high above our heads. It’s an albino redwood. An
enigma. A biological improbability—an organism
that shouldn’t exist.
“My guess is that this thing is probably a hun-
dred years old, or more,” says graduate student
Zane Moore, who studies redwood genomes at the
University of California, Davis. “It’s one of the tallest
in the county.”
Rather than being evergreen, the tree is everwhite,
its needles soft and waxy. Normally Sequoia semper-
virens, the coast redwood, survives by harvesting
sunlight and turning it into food—but this albino
is missing a crucial component of the basic cellular
machinery it needs to feed itself. Instead, it taps into
the root system of its pigmented parent and steals
sugars and nutrients.
Although rare on Earth, albinos grow naturally
within the fog-drenched coast redwood range.
They’re a scientific puzzle—mutated trees that are
somehow allowed to survive, even as parent trees
discard other shoots. A few are tall like the tree we’re
visiting, but most are shorter and shrubbier. Others
have sprouted high up in their parent trees. Maybe
50 or so are naturally occurring white-and-greenBY NADIA DRAKE PHOTOGRAPHS BY KENNY HURTADO
PHANTOM IN
THE FOREST
IT’S AN EVERGREEN
THAT’S WHITE. IT LIVES
LIKE A MOOCHER AND
LOOKS LIKE A GHOST.
THE ALBINO REDWOOD IS
A GENETIC MARVEL,
WRAPPED IN MYSTERY.
EXPLORE
A
SANTA CRUZ COUNTY, CALIFORNIA28 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC