What appeared to be "crazy stories" once came from the American Old West. The men spoke of trees over a hundred meters tall with trunks thirty meters high. Nonsense, people thought; "Who could believe such a thing?"

But the trees were there. Nothing else in the world has reached its enormous size and few things have lived longer. How come these giants got so big and survived so long? You may be interested in the answers, as these amazing creation examples are unusual in more ways than most people realize.

These trees, called the Big Tree, Sierra Redwood, Giant Sequoia, or Sequoiadendron giganteum, govern only a limited area about 260 miles long and generally between 4,000 feet and 8,500 feet on the west side of a single mountain range - the Sierra Nevada of California.

They are generally found in forests that can contain six to several thousand trees. There are many forests in the country that are still accessible only to hikers, but some of them are easily accessible by trails that lead to California's fertile Central Valley.

The long, winding roads to Big Tree Country cut through large pine forests. But suddenly you feel like something bigger. You have your first vision of a giant sequoia.

Tremendous Size

At first you don't realize the size of the redwood because the surrounding trees are so tall. Only when you stand at the base of a great tree and look up, or when you walk around it and count its steps, your incredible majesty begins to emerge in you.

Imagine a tree as tall as a 25-story building to illustrate the size of these trees. Imagine a single branch that is over six feet thick and imagine that branch so high on the tree trunk that you can place a twelve-story building on it. Imagine a tree with a trunk thirty feet in diameter. Cutting a city street and putting it aside would make it to the top of the third floor windows!

The largest of these trees contains more wood than is used to build 45-room houses, although its wood is generally not used in construction.

The General Sherman tree in Sequoia National Park is considered the largest living thing in the world. It is 272.4 feet tall and approximately 101.6 feet tall. It's a long way from the tallest tree in the world, but its massive trunk shrinks very little and contains an incredible amount of wood. Recent studies suggest that it may also be the fastest growing thing in the world, not in height, but in mass.

The birth of a great tree

The birth of one of these mighty trees is a relatively rare event. The largest living things in the world grow from a nucleus of seeds as small as the tip of a pin. It takes 90,000 of these seeds to produce one pound. They come at 5600 an ounce!

A single redwood produces millions of these tiny seeds, but only a few germinate. Fewer still grow into large trees. It has already been said: "It is not uncommon to see trees that have been planted year after year for a thousand years or more, but do not show reproduction from below." - Big Trees, Walter Fry and John R. White, 59.

The little redwood seed requires exposed mineral soil. It only finds it after a disturbance removes the foliage and branches that normally litter the forest floor. A fire caused by lightning can burn this debris. Or an old tree can topple over and expose the soil at the root.

Therefore, a seed can float to be easily buried. When the conditions are right, it swells and a small root grows. A shy stick rises towards the light. Still, its chances of survival are not great. A bird can see the seed coat that is still attached to the bud. Or a little ant can cut it up and take it home, to what could become one of the largest living things in the world!

But when childhood ends, Sequoia develops incredible power. At the end of the 1st century it was almost two meters in diameter and 45 meters high. It can survive serious physical damage.