This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
No tree species on the planet grows taller than the coast redwood, native to a narrow band along the Pacific coast from central California to southern Oregon. Individual redwoods reach roughly 110 meters, more than a third the height of the Eiffel Tower. Some coast redwoods alive today are estimated to be around 2,000 years old, long enough that a tree standing today may have germinated before the Roman Empire fell.
That scale depends heavily on the coastal fog that keeps the trees supplied with moisture through the dry California summer. Fog accounts for nearly forty percent of a coast redwood's water uptake during the dry months, condensing on the leaves and dripping down toward the roots. The tree's range has always been narrower than California's coastline as a whole, confined to the specific belt where that fog reaches consistently.
Much of the old growth forest that once covered that strip, roughly two million acres before large scale logging began, had been reduced to about ten percent of its original extent by the 1960s. The redwood the public now most often encounters, tall as it still is, is frequently second growth rather than the original ancient stands. What old growth remains is now concentrated in protected land, including Redwood National Park, established in 1968 specifically to preserve what was left of the original forest.