The world’s tallest known living tree is a coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) named Hyperion, 379.3 feet in height. Discovered in August 2006 in Redwood National and State Parks in California, the tree is estimated to be roughly 600 years old. Its exact location is kept secret to avoid tourists flocking to the tree which could unbalance the fragile ecosystem of the forest and harm the tree.
Hyperion has been quite lucky: only a few hundred feet from the base is the edge of a clear-cut from the seventies. Clear cutting is a forestry practice in which all trees in an area are logged and the entire area is devastated. About two weeks before also Hyperion would have been attacked by the chain saws, this valley was added to the Redwood National Park during the Carter administration. Logging companies feared this would happen and worked 24/7 in the broad redwood valleys and kept logging old growth forests that were there long before men were ever entered these valleys.
In the seventies only an alarming 15% of the rich redwood forests remained, nowadays only 4% still exists and even today old growth Californian forests are being logged.
Picture Credit : Google