A handful of amateurs discovered in the 1980s that nobody had ever been to the top of a redwood, and that the canopy three hundred feet up is a whole ecosystem — soil, huckleberry bushes, ferns, salamanders that live their entire lives without touching the ground. Preston follows Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and Michael Taylor as they learn to climb the tallest living things on earth, find the record-holders in unmapped groves, and eventually get taken seriously as scientists. Preston learned to climb so he could go up with them, and the vertigo comes through the page. A friend was so inspired, she assembled a crew to search for the hidden tallest, which is why it’s on my shelf.
The Wild Trees