The Tallest Known Tree in New York Falls in the Forest | The New Yorker
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Last July, one of Tree 103’s neighbors snapped and toppled. Tree 103 broke its fall. The weight was much to bear, and then the autumn winds slapped it around. Hikers who went to visit the tree on December 11th found instead a raggedy broken trunk and a fallen warrior. No one had been around to hear it fall, but, given its size and height, it would have released a huge amount of energy, equivalent to several sticks of dynamite, and it knocked over a number of smaller trees when it went down. Justin Waskiewicz, a forestry professor at Paul Smith’s College, which borders the land where Tree 103 stood, says that pine trees rarely live past three hundred and fifty years, so its demise wasn’t a surprise. Given the math, the whole grove of these giant pines will probably be gone sometime in the next fifty years. Do not despair: Tree 103 is no longer thrusting into the sky, but it lives on as forest debris, making fungi and bugs happy. “It’s dead, yes,” Waskiewicz said, “but I prefer to think that it’s just not vertical anymore.”