California Climbing   abi-@u.washington.edu
  Nov 16, 2005 08:03 PST 

Will,

Things have been extremely busy lately - due to endangered species, we have to get all of our climbing in between Sept 15th and March. We have been climbing almost continuously and have made some great progress. We have branch-mapped 15 Douglas firs and 15 redwoods. For Dougs, this includes the 96.4 m Hunewell Honey and 93.1 m Flagpole tree (talk about exposure!!). For redwoods, this includes five tree over 108 m tall. The crowning achievement was obtaining a complete branch map for the Stratosphere Giant !! At 112.87 m, this is the tallest known tree, and is also amazingly big and old. The tree has about 25,000 cubic feet and is probably about 2,500 years old. AMAZING! It took four people three full days to accomplish this. We finished yesterday and think this to be about the finest single-tree data set we have ever collected!

Cheers,
- BVP