This is the realm of the Coast Redwood tree.

And Chris, if you could take the end of that tape measure?

There was only one Sequoia.

You can see the range of the Coast Redwoods. It's here, in red.

I became very interested, and I wrote about a couple.

This is Allison and her wand made from a sequoia.

They also have the ability to put roots anywhere in the tree itself.

To pot growers and kids named Sequoia.

You feel like you're climbing a wall of wood.

Redwoods grow very slowly in their tops.

To us, when we look at a Redwood tree, it seems to be motionless and still, and yet Redwoods are constantly in motion, moving upward into space, articulating themselves and filling Redwood space over Redwood time, over thousands of years.

It became a writing project.

Its species name is Sequoia sempervirens.

And with a friend of his, he took it upon himself to free climb a Redwood without ropes or any equipment to see what was up there.

The scientists are doing all kinds of experiments in these trees.

They've wired them like patients in an ICU.

The Redwood species seems to exist in another kind of time not human time, but what we might call Redwood time.

Steve Sillett, when he was a 19 year old college student at Reed College, had heard that the Redwood forest canopy is considered to be a so called Redwood desert.

And as they put out limbs, the limbs burst into small trees, copies of the Redwood.

The Eastern Hemlock tree has often been described as the Redwood of the East.

Chris, could you extend your arm out that way? There we go. OK.

A Redwood is a fractal.

These limbs could be five to six hundred years old.

Now, let your imagination go upward into space.

This buttress is less than halfway up the tree.

This is a flying buttress.

These are trees that would stand out in midtown Manhattan.

Redwood time moves at a more stately pace than human time.

I'm going to do a little Gedanken experiment.

And yet, when you look at the base of a Redwood tree, you're not seeing the organism.

I think it's all the sequoia trees block the signal. I hate that.

But curiously, Redwood rainforests, the fragments that we have left, to this day remain under explored.

It's as big as any of the biggest trees east of the Mississippi River, and yet it's only a minor feature on Chronos.

Redwoods have an enormous surface area that extends upward into space because they have a propensity to do something called reiteration.

Down the coast here in California, the redwood forest grows to 40 stories tall.

He climbed up a small tree next to this giant Redwood, and then he leaped through space and grabbed a branch with his hands, and ended up hanging, like catching a bar of a trapeze.

There are two people climbing this tree, Gaya, which is thought to be one of the oldest Redwoods.

But as you go and you look closer at a tree, what you see is, you see increasing complexity.

I have to show you something unfortunately very sad at the conclusion of this talk.

Flying buttresses, just as in a cathedral, help strengthen the crown of the tree and help the tree exist longer through time.

And while we were climbing Hyperion, Marie Antoine spotted an unknown species of golden brown ant about halfway up the trunk.

What they're doing in the Redwood forest canopy soil hundreds of feet above the ocean, or how they got there, is completely unknown.

Nobody knows how old the oldest living Coast Redwoods are because nobody has ever drilled into any of them to count their annual growth rings, and, in any case, the centers of the oldest individuals appear to be hollow.

And if we were able to reiterate, then the fingers of our hand would be people who looked like us, and they would have people on their hands and so on.

They're finding out that Redwoods can move moisture out of the air and down into their trunks, possibly all the way into their root systems.