BIG TREES

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The following item was sent to me by colleague and friend Tony Z. Thanks Tony.

Take the time to have a close look at the pics and sppot the human figures for scale, it's like a Where's Wally.

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Just a quiet life in a California forest for all these years ... 3,200!

Not every tree has a nickname, but 'The President' has earned it.

This giant sequoia stands at 247 feet tall & is estimated to be over 3,200 years old.

Imagine, this tree was already 700 years old during the height of ancient Greece's civilization and 1200 years old when Jesus lived while Rome was well into its rule of most of the western world and points beyond.

The trunk of The President measures 27 feet across, with 2 BILLION needles from base to top.

Because of its unbelievable size, this tree has never been photographed in its entirety, until now.

National Geographic photographers have worked along with scientists to try and create the first photo that shows The President in all its glory.

They had to climb the tree with pulleys and levers and took thousands of photos.

Of those, they selected 126 and stitched them together to get this incredible portrait of The President.

And here it is:

The man standing near the trunk of the tree is a good indicator of the tree's size.

Incredible, isn't it?

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Plus some more . . .

The President Tree, July 2023

President Tree, with humans surrounding it with interlocked hands for scale in July 2023

The President Tree, before the "T" came off of its sign (March 2016)

The President is a giant sequoia located in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park in the United States, east of Visalia, California. It is approximately 247 feet (75 m) high, and 27 feet (8.2 m) in diameter at the base. The President is the second-largest tree in the world, measured by volume of trunk, and the oldest-known living sequoia, about 3,240 years old. As of 2012, the volume of its trunk measured at about 54,000 cubic feet (1,500 m3), with an additional 9,000 cubic feet (250 m3) of branches.

The tree was named after President Warren G. Harding in 1923. Nearby trees include Chief Sequoyah, the 27th-largest giant sequoia in the world, and the Congress Group, two dense stands of medium-sized sequoias that represent the "House" and "Senate".

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General Sherman is a giant sequoia tree located at an elevation of 2,109 m (6,919 ft) above sea level in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park in Tulare County, in the U.S. state of California. By volume, it is the largest known living single-stem tree on Earth.

The General Sherman tree was named after the American Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. The official story, which may be apocryphal, claims the tree was named in 1879 by naturalist James Wolverton, who had served as a lieutenant in the 9th Indiana Cavalry under Sherman.

Seven years later, in 1886, the land came under the control of the Kaweah Colony, a utopian socialist community whose economy was based on logging. Noting the pivotal role that Sherman had played in the Indian Wars and his forced relocation of native American tribes, they renamed the tree in honor of Karl Marx. However, the community was disbanded in 1892, primarily as a result of the establishment of Sequoia National Park, and the tree reverted to its previous name.

In 1931, following comparisons with the nearby General Grant tree, General Sherman was identified as the largest tree in the world. One result of this process was that wood volume became widely accepted as the standard for establishing and comparing the size of different trees.