Tree-Climbers

Excellent excellent book. This is a story about people who risk their lives to climb trees and study them. It's no joke when you talk about leaping from one branch/tree to another at a height of more than twenty storeys, and though safety ropes are used, people do actually die. Preston narrates an account of a guy who miraculously survived a fall from more than a hundred feet high, but he is probably one of the very very few who do so. These people do not just climb for leisure, unlike myself (I feel kind of ashamed that I am not doing very much for the trees sometimes); many of them are scientists who conduct extensive studies on the ecosystems high up in the canopies of the world's tallest trees, which otherwise would have remained unknown to the world. The book talks alot about the world's tallest trees: the coastal redwood (more than 300 feet/30 storeys high) which are found in the Northwest of the States, namely, Northern California and Oregon. I would love to go and do some climbs and see how it's like so high up there. Even when you are four or five storeys high on a tree in Singapore, the whole world would seem totally different. You hear different things than what you would on the ground, you definitely gain a new perspective and even the smells are different. There is also this indescribable sense of quietness that I call "green silence" that seems to emanate from the trees. Set up a hammock, read or just snooze. Mmm.. throw in a stop at Olympic Peninsula in Washington to see the Pacific temperate rainforests and it would be a perfect vacation.