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A tagged northern spotted owl swoops toward a researcher’s lure in a young redwood forest.
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On company land near the Mad River in northern California, Lowell Diller, senior biologist for Green Diamond Resource Company, and his inseparable assistant, Riley, lure a northern spotted owl to an old-growth stump baited with a mouse (not pictured). In the early 1990s Diller was one of the first researchers to discover large populations of the threatened owls living in second-growth forests.
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A ragged blanket of coastal fog in northern California’s Humboldt Redwoods State Park nurtures old giants alongside smaller second-growth trees outside the park. Redwoods depend on fog for more than 30 percent of their water needs.
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An old-growth redwood dwarfs younger redwood growth in California’s Bear Creek Watershed on the northwest side of Bear Creek Ridge. Peavine Ridge sits in the distance in Rockefeller Forest, the world’s largest continuous old-growth redwood forest, measuring more than 10,000 acres.
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Fourteen stories up a 30-story tree, Humboldt State University scientist Steve Sillett (at center) and his team measure a fire cave in a massive redwood in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. Wildfires have twice burned this tree but failed to kill it.
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A rare December snow dusts a trail through Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park. Dependent on a cool marine climate, Sequoia sempervirens—the coast redwood—thrives between five and 30 miles inland.
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Cathedral silence fills the old-growth sanctuary of Humboldt Redwoods State Park.
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Photograph by Michael Christopher Brown
National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Mike Fay emerges from a hellish hike down Little Lost Man Creek in Redwood National Park. In 2008 Fay and hiking partner Lindsey Holm finished the first comprehensive transect of the redwood range, covering 1,800 miles of Pacific coastal forest.
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Photograph by Michael Christopher Brown
From the southernmost redwood in Big Sur to the northernmost tree near Oregon’s Chetco River, Mike Fay and Lindsey Holm spent almost a year walking the redwoods, stopping often to record plants, animals, and forest conditions around them. Along the way they passed through the birthplace of redwood logging in the Santa Cruz Mountains (above).
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Photograph by Michael Christopher Brown
Fay and Holm also passed through San Francisco, rebuilt with redwood timber after the earthquake and fires of 1906, and across the Golden Gate Bridge.
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Photograph by Michael Christopher Brown
Hauling laptops, hard drives, and cameras in 60-pound packs, Fay and Holm used the woods as their office and springs and rivers as their faucet and bathtub.
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Photograph by Michael Christopher Brown
The duo’s focus was forest management. Here, Fay notes the size of a truckload of logs.
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Photograph by Michael Christopher Brown
Fay checks out a burn pile in a clear-cut.
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Photograph by Michael Christopher Brown
Fay and Holm look for marbled murrelets up high in old growth. “In 20 years we won’t think of logging these lands like we do today,” Fay says. “Our knowledge of these forests is constantly evolving.”
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Ray “Old Growth” Wood makes the undercut on a redwood 30 inches in diameter—a sapling compared to the 16-footers he cut as a young man. “It’s boom and bust,” 67-year-old Wood says of the log market, now at its lowest point in decades.
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Laughter cheers the struggling Humboldt County lumber town of Rio Dell as kids get splashed during the annual Wildwood Days fair. Local unemployment hit a 16-year high this March. With timber demand down, Humboldt Redwood Company will cut just a third of its planned 2009-2010 harvest.
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Hanging on tight, seven-year-old Katielyn Ellis tries her luck at “mutton bustin’” at the annual family-style rodeo in Orick, California, a town of about 300 residents on the edge of Redwood National Park. The creation of the park in 1968 and its expansion a decade later have cost the mill town timber jobs that tourism has yet to replace.
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Roosevelt elk cows scatter across a meadow in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park as two bulls vie for dominance of the herd. Largest of North America’s elk subspecies, their name honors conservationist President Theodore Roosevelt.
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A black bear saunters past a camera trap set by photographer Michael Nichols. When more nutritious foods are scarce, bears often strip the bark off young redwoods to get at the sap below, wreaking havoc on regrowth in timberlands.
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Decomposer of the redwood forest, the native banana slug (Ariolimax columbianus) is the second largest in the world, growing up to ten inches long.
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Equipped with radar, Dave Bigger, at the time a biologist for Humboldt Redwood Company, searches before dawn for endangered marbled murrelets during the birds’ summer breeding season—a requirement under the timber firm’s Habitat Conservation Plan. Despite such protections and a logging ban on much of the murrelet habitat in federal and private forests, the population of the fast-flying seabird, which depends on large blocks of old-growth forest for nesting, is still dropping. Now estimated at 18,000, murrelet numbers have declined by 34 percent between Monterey Bay and the Canadian border since 2001, and by 75 percent south of Monterey Bay since 2003, in part because their ocean supplies of herring and other fish are diminishing.
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Partway up a 350-foot tree, botanist Marie Antoine (at right) passes a slender core sample of its wood—750 years of redwood biography—to canopy ecologist Giacomo Renzullo. Research now shows that the older such trees get, the more wood they put on.
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Laying hands on an old friend, activist Amy Arcuri shows her delight in Spooner, a giant she says is nearly 2,000 years old. Once slated to be cut, the tree has been declared off-limits by its new owner, Humboldt Redwood Company. “I try to believe there can be progressive change,” Arcuri says.
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Geologist Neal Youngblood holds an aerial photograph encompassing the 48,000 acres acquired by Redwood National Park in 1978, when the area was laced with clear-cuts and 450 miles of logging roads. Landslides and erosion in the headwaters of Redwood Creek, which imperiled ancient groves and the salmon and steelhead fisheries, provided the impetus for park expansion. Since then some 325 miles of roads in the park have been returned to wilderness, like the one behind him in Lost Man Creek, which will prevent some six million cubic yards of sediment from ending up in creeks.
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Josh Sargent (at left) and Rod Aiton unhook redwood logs from the chokers at a landing on a Green Diamond Resource Company tract near Maple Creek, California. As “landing chasers,” they trim branches and get the logs ready for loading onto a truck.
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Clear-cuts eat into stands of 55-year-old spruce, fir, and redwood trees on Green Diamond company land in Humboldt County. California regulations require companies practicing such even-age management to leave buffer zones between cuts and around streams.
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Glass plate: Ericson Collection, Humboldt State University Library
This photograph is reproduced as a negative to show the glass image as a positive.
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