Wanted: Trees Big As All Outdoors

Text by Karen Brebner Augé Photographs by Jerry Sieve I am not a born tree hunter.

I learned this the hard way one hot July day as the hours dragged on, the temperature soared, and my prey, the world's largest Arizona typical cypress, blended in with the thousands of ponderosa pines and typical and not-so-typical cypresses that surround it at Mount Lemmon's Bear Canyon picnic area.

In other words, I couldn't see the tree for the forest.

I suppose I expected it to be roped off or lit up with searchlights. After all, the cypress I sought is a celebrity of sorts in the conifer kingdom, according to the American Forestry Association's National Register of Big Trees.

The register is a compilation of the country's tallest, stock-iest, most statuesque trees called national champions representing more than 600 native and naturalized species.

And, according to that registry, the largest Arizona typical cypress (Cupressus arizonica var. arizonica Greene) was supposed to be just about where I was searching.

Frank Callahan, the man the forestry association credits with finding the largest Arizona typical cypress, probably had

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Fire in the Tonto National Forest destroyed the world's largest alligator juniper (ABOVE), photographed by Jack K. O'Leile. The man in the tree is six feet tall. This alligator juniper (OPPOSITE PAGE) is in southeastern Arizona.

WANTED: BIG TREES

Continued from page 19 less difficulty discovering the giant in the first place than I had been experiencing then, searching for it after no less than three rangers of the Coronado National Forest aimed me in the right direction. But Frank Callahan is a born big-tree hunter. The 43-year-old Oregonian, who runs a seed company from his Central Point home, is credited with locating six of Arizona's 26 National Champion Big Trees. Callahan, Arizona's current champion among champion finders, did not confine his tree searches to the Grand Canyon State. His penchant for seeking tall trees has taken him throughout the West, from Oregon to Texas, and has resulted in his name appearing no less than 47 times in the national register. Formidable though it is, Callahan's tally doesn't put him atop the nationwide treehunting heap. A handful of hunters, including another Oregonian, Maynard Drawson, have found more. While Callahan and Drawson compare tree-hunting notes, Callahan says he doesn't know too many of his tree-finding cohorts. "I don't think there's a real good network. Most of us are kind of loners." Indeed, the solitude of a deep-forest quest with his wife and two children is part of what attracts this avid environmentalist to this pursuit. His reward for bagging this prey is different from those afforded hunters of other "big game." Callahan never gets to mount his trophy and hang it over the mantel. He can't point to the camaraderie, the male bonding, of stalking his quarry with his buddies. He can't even swap tales of the ones that got away. Callahan's prize, he says, is "scientific satisfaction." Tree tracking is a natural outgrowth of his profession. Gathering plants and seedlings for sale to nurseries and landscapers makes Callahan a frequent visitor to the big trees' home territories. Which may give him an unfair advantage over the rest of us, since forests are his satellite office, and his job demands an extensive knowledge of tree species and subspecies like being able to differentiate between an Arizona cypress with its smooth bark and an Arizona typical cypress with its rough bark. He doesn't deny his advantage. "I've been in the field so much, it's kind of second nature," he confesses. But he has some tips for rookies who are not so well versed in botany. For instance, finding big trees is a matter of going where they tend to grow, Callahanremarks . That's not as simple as it sounds, he adds. Experience has taught him that towering trees do not necessarily live deep in a forest. Frequently, big trees thrive in areas that have been cut for timber. The absence of other trees competing for nutrients helps some species bulk up, he says. Sometimes a champion stands in the middle of a city. "That's shocking to people. They'll say, 'Hey, I thought that tree was big, but no one realized it was that big.'" Callahan suggests tree searchers keep their eyes peeled for old, gnarly specimens because age and size go hand in hand among trees. "They tend to stand out when you know what to look for," he says. Callahan acknowledges that tree tracking can be tough for nonbotanists. But, he maintains, even amateurs can enjoy themselves hunting in our nation's woods. "If a person is going to have a hobby, this is one of the neatest ones," he says. "You're not destroying the environment; you're out there trying to find and hold on to rare tree specimens.' And get some national recognition in the process. In our nation's capitol, presumably next door to where heads of state plot the course of nations, a stone's throw from where the country's greatest economic minds grapple with a runaway budget deficit, a group of people is carefully cataloging our biggest trees, tenaciously researching each submitted claim of a new big-tree discovery. That group, part of the American Forestry Association, celebrated its 50th anniversary of tracking tall timber in 1990. "We're kind of the 'Ripley's Believe it or Not' of trees, "explains Deborah Gangloff, a spokeswoman for the AmericanContinued on page 26 (PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 20 AND 21) A giant Emory oak (LEFT) on the Empire Cienega Ranch. An Apache pine (ABOVE) in the Chiricahua National Monument. A willow (RIGHT) in the Cave Creek area.

Continued from page 22 Forestry Association describing the register. "This is a citizen-participation thing. We're interested in getting citizens involved in caring about trees."

The tree-hunting idea sprouted in 1940, thanks to forester Joseph L. Sterns. In an issue of America's Forests magazine printed that year, Stearns challenged tree lovers to "find and save the biggest trees," and to "fight for the preservation of our biggest tree specimens."

Sterns, then a research engineer with Southern Hardwood Producers of Memphis, Tennessee, also may have been concerned about the nation's unprecedented appetite for timber in the wake of World War II. In any case, the American Forestry Association endorsed Sterns' appeal and chipped in its own resources to help the idea grow.

The association, which has no formal government ties, is described by Gangloff as "the nation's oldest citizen's conservation group." It launched the big-tree

WHEN YOU GO

You've heeded the call of the wild, sallied forth into a forest, and come upon what must be the largest tree of its kind on the planet. What do you do next?

The National Register of Big Trees offers the following tips for nominating a champion tree:

program in 1940 with a list of 100 species published beneath the headline: "WANTED! The Location and Measurement of the Largest Specimens of the Following American Tree Species."

Tree seekers got the ball rolling with the nomination of a chestnut oak in Suffield, Connecticut, in October that year.

Since then, the nationwide hunt has been on. The most recent register, published in 1990, lists what it calls national champions for nearly 700 species. The registry was busy as well, adding native tree species to a list that today includes more than 850 native and naturalized varieties.

Currently Arizona has 26 big trees enshrined in the national register's hall of fame from a 16-foot canotia (generally a smallish tree resembling a paloverde) near Globe to a 120-foot Rocky Mountain ponderosa pine in Yavapai County. It may not be an astronomical number compared with the tallies of leafier locales such as Washington, Oregon, and California, but it's not too shabby for a state known more for its succulents than for its conifers.

Florida leads all states with 106 national champions. Gangloff speculates that's because the Sunshine State is home to numerous species that don't grow elsewhere in the country.

Arizona's record is made more impressive by the state's lack of a big-tree coordinator. We are one of only a handful of states Gangloff thinks the number is four without a person or agency tracking big-tree finds here.

But not every discovery is the triumphant result of a tree safari. Apache Sitgreaves National Forest Ranger Bobby Chavez, for instance, got his name recorded in the annals of big-tree history completely by chance.

"We were doing some preventive burning in the bottom of a canyon, and I happened to see the tree. It seemed like an exceptionally large tree. I became internested in it because I had never seen one that large."

Chavez recounts that two Forest Service employees with him stood next to the Arizona cypress (not to be confused with Frank Callahan's Arizona typical cypress on Mount Lemmon).

"They stood against it while I took a photograph, and they were completely dwarfed by it."

Chavez submitted the vital statistics of his find a 97-foot-big specimen, 18 miles north of Clifton on the Coronado Trail to the national register. And the rest, as they say, is history.

A 15-year veteran of the Forest Service, Chavez, who grew up in Springerville, says he read of the National Register of Big Trees in the Forest Service's magazine.

But, he adds, his discovery hasn't set him on the path of recurrent big-tree stalking. "I don't think too many people do Arizona week since people began keep-ing track. And even as I plodded through an unusually torrid pine forest, I knew that on the next mountain over less inept tree hunters could be cooling their heels in the shadow of an Arizona typical cypress big enough to knock ours right out of the record books. That's happened to Callahan five or six times. But, he says, he doesn't really mind being displaced. "I'm just happy that people are out there with the same interest."

At one point, I seriously considered offering a group of kids $5 to take over the search. After all, Callahan says his 11year-old son named Forrest - and 9year-old daughter are blossoming into world-class tree finders in their own right.

Maybe kids have keener eyesight for this sort of thing.

But I was comforted by the fact that Callahan also has come up empty in numerous searches.

And that was going to be my fate on that scorching July afternoon. Hot, tired, defeated, and nursing a neck that was sore from looking heavenward, I packed up and prepared to skulk back down the mountain. As I started along the road, I tried to console myself with the argument that there are other hobbies, other ways to enjoy the outdoors, other people who walked right past national champion trees without recognizing them.

But then I saw it. Definitely a cypress. It certainly looked bigger than its neighbors. And it was growing in a sort of gully, just as the rangers said it would be.

I spun the car around, flinging gravel in my wake. I grabbed my camera, got out of the car, and, braving traffic on the narrow winding road, peered down over the side of the cliff. That was it. It was huge, it was thick; and I was elated. Maybe what I saw was a mirage. Maybe the vision was the product of a brain exhausted by hours of staring at trees. But at that moment, I was sure I was looking at the world's largest Arizona typical cypress. Out of an endless sea of trees, I found the biggest.

Frank Callahan would be proud.

Karen Brebner Augé, a former managing editor of Phoenix magazine, grew up in Arizona, but paid little attention to its trees until recently. She now is a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based free-lance writer. Jerry Sieve is a longtime member of The Wilderness Society and The Nature Conservancy.

ANTED: BIG TREES

Says Allen Jaten, Coronado National Forest ranger.

Although the goal of the association and many of the tree hunters is to protect the venerable giants, sometimes the notoriety granted big trees does just the opposite.

Callahan recounts one instance when the national cham-pion distinction apparently cost a tree its life. The tree, a cypress in Santa Cruz County, California, became so well-known in the area that when a company wanted to remove it to plant a vineyard on the property, the local city council nixed the plan. Soon afterward "someone came in and felled the (ABOVE) Autumnal hues tint these aspens in the Coronado National Forest.

Tree. The thing was tied up in a lawsuit for seven years," Callahan says.

But Callahan, who combines fervent environmental protectionism with pragmatism, thinks the scenario could have played out differently. "If they'd done it right, that tree could have been a positive thing for the vineyard. They could have put it on their label, made a big deal of it."

Then there are those of us who are pathetically inept at spotting big trees, and who wouldn't dream of defacing one. And sometimes those of us who want only to find, photograph, and admire the world's largest specimens, such as the Arizona typicalcypress, need a clearly marked trail and blinking neon arrows in order to accomplish that.

That's why, like many celebrities these days, my famous prey seemed to be shrinking from the gawking curious hopping to snap its photograph. At least that's the kind of goofy thought that came to mind after hours of intensive tree hunting at the tail end of what was the hottest