{"id":3634,"date":"2022-08-03T09:17:19","date_gmt":"2022-08-03T16:17:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/?p=3634"},"modified":"2022-08-03T09:17:19","modified_gmt":"2022-08-03T16:17:19","slug":"to-guard-worlds-tallest-tree-state-poses-fines-and-jail-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/2022\/08\/03\/to-guard-worlds-tallest-tree-state-poses-fines-and-jail-time\/","title":{"rendered":"To guard world’s tallest tree, state poses fines and jail time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sturdy, Instagram-ready thrill-seekers are entranced by Hyperion\u2019s size and challenged by the secrecy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Source of this article: The Los Angeles Times, August 2, 2022<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It sounds hard to hide the tallest tree in the world. But that\u2019s exactly what officials at California\u2019s Redwood National Park have been trying to do since 2006.<\/p>\n

Now, the 380-foot redwood tree is officially off-limits. In a statement last week, the park wrote that visitors caught near it could face six months in jail and a $5,000 fine.<\/p>\n

For 16 years, the park kept the location of the tree hidden in order to protect it. They feared that too many visitors to the site could damage it and the delicate ecology of its surrounding slopes.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople have the right to come and enjoy their parks,\u201d said Leonel Arguello, the park\u2019s chief of natural resources. \u201cHowever, our concern has to do with the safety of visitors and the protection of resources. And when we see potential damage, we have to make decisions that protect those things.\u201d<\/p>\n

The coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) is estimated to be 600 to 800 years old. Named Hyperion, after the Greek Titan god of heavenly light, it stands deep in the park and has no trails leading to it, but its internet fame has made it a frequent destination for thrill-seekers, travel bloggers and tree enthusiasts. People are fascinated by Hyperion\u2019s size and secrecy. Over the years, it\u2019s been the subject of hundreds of Reddit threads.<\/p>\n

\u201cGive me 7 million dollars and a plane, and I will find it,\u201d said one user.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would be so epic to climb it and look out,\u201d said another.<\/p>\n

One comment reads: \u201cThink of all the napkins we could make out of that thing! We have to find it!\u201d<\/p>\n

Given Hyperion\u2019s off-trail location, hikers must walk through heavy vegetation and bushwhack to reach it, the statement says. This causes irreversible environmental damage. People leave trash and human waste, create secondary footpaths and trample the area around the tree. Some even bring drones or try to climb Hyperion. The result is degradation of the tree\u2019s base and an unnatural lack of vegetation around it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no park trail there. It\u2019s just wild land,\u201d Arguello said. \u201cAnd not only is the vegetation being damaged, there\u2019s human waste and garbage being left behind because there\u2019s no facilities nearby.\u201d<\/p>\n

Redwood trees grow on the coast from Big Sur up to the California Oregon border and nowhere else in the world. They can live more than a thousand years and have been around for more than 200 million years.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve lost 95% of old-growth redwoods,\u201d said Joanna Nelson, director of conservation planning at Save the Redwoods League. \u201cOnly 5% remain that haven\u2019t been logged commercially. Almost half of those are found in Redwood National Park.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Nelson, companies like to cut redwoods down to build fences and decks because they naturally resist rot and pests. The national park protects their redwoods from logging, but it\u2019s much harder to prevent eager hikers from trampling. Their foot traffic can lead to soil compaction, damaging the tree\u2019s shallow roots.<\/p>\n

\u201cPressing the soil down is going to hurt the tree\u2019s ability to survive,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cGetting water out of compacted soil is a lot harder for the finer roots.\u201d<\/p>\n

Visits to Hyperion are also dangerous for visitors, officials say. The area has limited cellphone reception and GPS coverage, which makes rescuing lost or injured hikers very challenging.<\/p>\n

So why not just build a new trail? The answer is that at some point, park officials believe Hyperion will be surpassed by another tree.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s just the natural way of things in these open redwood forests,\u201d Arguello said. \u201cIf we built a trail, that\u2019s going to cost a lot of money. If we maintained a trail annually, that\u2019s going to cost a lot of money. And then when Hyperion is outgrown, we\u2019ll have to build a trail to another tree. We want to be careful with public dollars. We have plenty of trails already built for visitors.\u201d<\/p>\n

On some other trails, the park has built raised walkways to diminish the human footprint.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey know how to safely bring lots of people in to experience the redwoods without damage,\u201d Nelson said.<\/p>\n

Mario Vaden, a certified arborist and redwood explorer, has visited Hyperion many times over the years. He\u2019s been documenting it since 2009, but stopped going around 2015 when he became aware of the damage caused by other hikers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhenever you bushwhack, you always alter something,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if you\u2019re going into an area and nobody is going through there again after you, it\u2019s inconsequential. The area will have time to recover. When there\u2019s no recovery time, things can get permanently damaged, and I didn\u2019t want to be a part of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vaden said that there\u2019s a tipping point with these trees when exploring can become detrimental.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs an explorer, I like to be able to bushwhack anywhere,\u201d Vaden said. \u201cBut I\u2019m glad the area is closed at the moment because I had already quit going there myself as soon as I knew it was getting damaged.\u201d<\/p>\n

The park has issued closures for various reasons in the past.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are always gonna be sneaky and try to go because that\u2019s what people do,\u201d Arguello said. \u201cSo what we want to do through this closure is minimize that impact and hopefully the area can begin to recover on its own.\u201d<\/p>\n

Further, park officials say Hyperion is not the most impressive tree in the area and doesn\u2019t match up to its hype. The trunk is small in comparison with other old redwood trees and it\u2019s impossible to observe its height from the ground.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis tree is not really that incredible,\u201c Arguello said. \u201cBasically, when you\u2019re there, you see the lowest branch, and that\u2019s it. It\u2019s a lot of hard work for very minimal payoff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vaden agrees.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s so much other forest that I prefer to see,\u201d he said. \u201cI actually think there\u2019s better trees to see. Right now, my time is being invested into looking at other things.\u201d<\/p>\n

The park is doing everything it can to prevent human visits to Hyperion, especially now as wildfires present a threat that is much more difficult to manage.<\/p>\n

Arguello, who\u2019s worked with the park since 1988, just wants to see it thrive.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love this park,\u201d he said. \u201cAnyone who comes up here would enjoy it without feeling like they missed something by not going to the tallest tree.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sturdy, Instagram-ready thrill-seekers are entranced by Hyperion\u2019s size and challenged by the secrecy. Source of this article: The Los Angeles Times, August 2, 2022 It sounds hard to hide the tallest tree in the world. But that\u2019s exactly what officials at California\u2019s Redwood National Park have been trying to do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3635,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,7,32,6,9,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-california","category-environment","category-nps","category-hiking","category-water-shortage","category-wildfire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3634"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3637,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3634\/revisions\/3637"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}