One of the largest creatures in the world lives almost 10,000 feet up the side of a mountain north of Bryce Canyon National Park between the little communities of Koosharem and Loa.
It is a single quaking aspen tree (Populus tremuloides) named Pando (Latin for “I spread”). This single tree covers 108 acres of the mountaintop. That's an area of about ¾ of a mile by ¼ of a mile – and it is one single tree.
Of course it has a lot of trunks, in this case called “stems,” so that it looks like an aspen forest. But scientists have determined that all the aspen stems in this forest are genetically identical.
Pando is a single male quaking aspen tree with more than 40,000 eighty-foot tall stems presumably joined underground by a massive root complex. It is estimated that Pando weighs upwards of 6,000 tons.
It is appropriate that this world's largest tree lives in the Fish Lake basin, sipping at the waters of the world's largest natural mountain freshwater lake.
But you don't have to drive 2,000 miles and climb a mountain to see giants.
A while back, a copy editor working on Ernest Herndon's and my new book, Paddleways of Mississippi (University Press of Mississippi, 2024), was stymied by our mention of “record trees” at Clark Creek Recreation area in Wilkinson County Miss.
The editor could not figure out in what sense three different trees at Clark Creek could be said to be record trees. We had to explain that there are organizations that measure and classify big trees, that these organizations have criteria and formulae for measuring the trees, and that Clark Creek Recreation Area is home to a world record Mexican plum tree, a Mississippi record hop hornbeam, and a world record bigleaf snowbell tree.
Of course, if you do end up a couple thousand miles to the west and have some time on your hands there are lots of these giants like Pando that you can look for.
Elise and I are trying to hash out our driving route to our next workcamping gig to be able to stop and see some of the giants of the west.
We have several choices including the General Sherman tree in Sequoia National Park (largest single-stem tree in the world), the 4800-year old Methuselah bristlecone pine (oldest tree on Earth) that lives in Inyo National Forest north of Death Valley, or the 380-foot tall Hyperion tree (tallest in the world) that lives in Redwood National Forest in Northern California.
A little farther out of our way is the Humongus Fungus – a single Armillaria ostoyae mushroom that is eating its way through 2400 acres of the Malheur National Forest in eastern Oregon
Of course, it's not really much of a choice because Methuselah and Hyperion are so unique that their exact locations are kept secret within closed and ranger-guarded tracts of the National Parks and Forests – so it looks like we'll be visiting General Sherman pretty soon.
