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Avenue of the Giants
Fri Dec 03, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. Steve Horvitz is a superintendent with
California State Parks. One of the areas he oversees is Humboldt Redwoods State
Park.
BY: So right now we are standing in the middle of the Avenue of the Giants, can you tell
us what that is?
SH: The redwoods that you see here is probably the largest expanse of contiguous
redwoods in the United States—right here. As a matter of fact, if I’m not mistaken, the
tallest tree in the world is here at Humboldt Redwoods; I believe the second and third
tallest are also at Humboldt Redwoods.
BY: So it takes a very, very specialized climate to produce the conditions that these
trees can grow in.
SH: These trees, and this resource that we’re standing in needs a huge amount of
water, and typically right here at Humboldt Redwoods we’ll have anywhere from 60
inches to 100 inches of rain every year, and they need that.
These trees are interesting in that it appears that not only do they absorb, or bring
water up through their roots, when the soil is saturated, but during the summer, when
we don’t have rain (and it can get dry here, in the summer), they tend to pull water out of
the fog, from the uppermost reaches of the trees.
BY: How old are some of these trees here?
SH: Well, they can date back a couple thousand years. And that’s phenomenal when
you think about standing next to a very small redwood tree that has been around for
maybe a few years, to think that it, in fact, might be here a thousand, fifteen hundred
years from today.
The Weather Notebook is a program of the Mount Washington Observatory, brought to
you by Subaru of America. Find us online at www.weathernotebook.org.
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