CHASING CHAMPION TREES

JUST BELOW THE MOGOLLON RIM, in a riparian grove along Pine Creek, my small hunting party halted in the silence of the forest. I pointed to our quarry: a handful of tall Arizona white oaks lurking in the shadows, their round heads bulging through the forest canopy.

I nodded toward a trophy specimen with a strong, clean trunk and a slight easterly lean. "What do you think?" I asked big-tree hunters Ken Morrow and Mike Hallen. "Is it a champ?"

By "champ" I meant the biggest tree of its species anywhere in the country.

Morrow eyeballed the big oak appreciatively, then stooped to unpack his tools. "Mmmmm," he muttered, "we'll see, we'll see."

If you really want to find out if a tree is of championship quality, ask Morrow and Hallen. They're officials of the Arizona Register of Big Trees, an affiliate of American Forests in Washington, D.C., an organization that has been certifying champion trees since 1940.

Constantly on the trail of big trees in Arizona, Morrow and Hallen look for three things: girth, height and crown. A tree earns one point for every inch of girth, one point for every foot of height, and one-quarter point for every foot of crown circumference. The tree of each species that garners the most points wins the coveted title of "Champion Tree."

Girth (or circumference) is the most important of the three measurements. Not only does it earn more points per inch than the others do per foot, but it also is what big-tree hunters initially use to "size up" a tree. This fact inevitably led Morrow and Hallen to the tongue-in-cheek motto "Girth First!" - parodying the name of a radical environmental group.

But they are serious about their champions. A high degree of pride rests on the number of champion trees a state possesses. Florida currently owns top bragging rights with 151 champs (1998-1999 National Register of Big Trees), while California is second with 86 and Texas third with 76. But Arizona has been posting new champions faster than any other state and has grabbed fourth place with 58. Morrow and Hallen hope to find more new champs for Arizona before the next register.

Hallen trotted over to the oak trunk with tape measure in hand. Like Morrow, he's a tough, wiry bundle of energy, and brings a particular enthusiasm for the chase. "Chase" is the operative word here, because champion trees exhibit an alarming habit of skipping out of the forest once they've beenreported.

Like my experience with the in-famous Superstition trees.

It happened on my first tree hunt, a high mileage, warp-speed backpack trip deep into the eastern Superstition Wilderness. The approach foreshadowed our outcome: On the rough road to the trailhead, a perfectly good truck tire blew out. I panicked, then pulled my emergency brake so hard the handle ripped clean off. And, oh yeah, the spare was flat.

Once on the trail, we engaged in a two-day wild goose chase through thorn brush and cactus pad. Our results were dismal. A reported champion white oak, when finally apprehended, had somehow changed species and become a wrong-kind-of-oak. And a reported 25-foot-tall champion manzanita had completely fled the country.

After this fiasco, I proposed we look at some big trees near Payson - trees that I promised would remain single-species and stationary. Morrow and Hallen expressed dubious interest.Now the time had come to see if any of the trees we found were champions.

Hallen pulled his tape around my oak. Girth, 108 inches. This was not good. The existing champ measured a full 10 points better. Though not overly tall, the champ also possessed a formidable crown measurement that my tree would be hard-pressed to beat. I gave up.

But Morrow decided to make the height measurement anyway. Mostly, he wanted to show off his special clinometer technique - the clinometer being a small bubble-level mechanism that measures angle of elevation. With a bit of geometry and some simple math, big-tree hunters can turn a clinometer's reading into an accurate height.

Morrow's "special" technique, however, turned out to be little more than tapping on the side of the instrument. I raised my eyebrows. "This is professional-style tapping," he informed me. "You have to use

THE big tree HUNT