Breakfast with champions

Let’s start back in 2005. That's me, standing next to a state champion hickory tree in western Maryland. A tree is a champion when it is the largest of its species in the state. Usually it means that someone has measured the diameter of the stem at breast height, and verified that it is the widest living tree. So “largeness” is typically measured by a tree’s girth. Sometimes there are lists for the tallest trees as well, but heights are much harder to measure. How would you do it?

                I have a Ph. D. in forestry and I get to meet a lot of people that do different things in the forest. A few years ago, I met a grad student from North Carolina who had gotten into searching for champion trees as a teenager. He spent a lot of time going out in the woods and exploring, simply searching for really large trees. He found a bunch too! His mentors were master tree climbers, so when they wanted to measure the height of a tree, one of them would climb to the top with ropes and drop a tape measure to a partner on the ground. Kind of crazy, but can you imagine the view from up there? As it happens, some of the largest trees in the eastern US grow in the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina, so these tree hunters were climbing to impressive heights.

                The champion hickory in this shot was found in Green Ridge State Forest, one of my field sites. It is likely more than 200 years old, but check out how it is hollow at the base. We determine how old a tree is by extracting a section of wood that goes to the center of the tree and counting the annual rings. A big, old tree can be hollow like this and still be perfectly healthy, but it no longer has a complete record of all the years the tree has lived. As a result, old trees like this can lie about their age, or at least keep it a secret. But they can still tell us a lot about what this forest used to be like. One thing it tells me is that there used to be a lot more big trees like this than we find today.

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My friend, Jess, measuring a yellow buckeye we found in the Great Smoky Mountains.