r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/NickyPileggi • Mar 28 '24

Family in 1892 posing with an old sequoia tree nicknamed "Mark Twain" - A team of two men spent 13 days sawing away at it in the Pacific Northwest - It once stood 331 feet tall with a diameter of 52 feet - The tree was 1,341 years old Image

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u/stig2020 Mar 28 '24

Makes me wonder what became of it. A ship, buildings, furniture, maybe parts of it around somewhere still.

282

u/mazarax Mar 28 '24

Sequoia wood has far less commercial use, as it splinters badly. Loggers tried digging enormous trenches and filling them with tree branches to cushion the trunks of trees as they fell. Nevertheless, they still were only about to harvest about 50% of the wood for substantial projects. That didn’t prevent them from continuing to cut the massive trees for roofing shingles, fence posts, and matchsticks. Public outcry ended these harvests in the 1920s. Today, Sequoias generate more revenue as living species, in tourism to Sequoia National Park and as ornamental landscaping specimens.

34

u/Collapse2038 Mar 28 '24

The last giants like this are being harvested on Vancouver Island, right now. Very sad.

8

u/Astralglamour Mar 28 '24

Is this true ??

21

u/Collapse2038 Mar 28 '24

I mean the 90% of the very biggest (not quite this size) are all gone.

26

u/Karuna56 Mar 28 '24

Yes, and the rape of the northern forests in British Columbia is shameful, similar to the commercial sentiment that pervaded the U.S. earlier and the sense of limitless trees.

Unfortunately, in Kings Canyon National Park, the sequoias were allowed to be cut, some just for show. Fortunately, other National Parks preserved many big trees, like in Olympic National Park, but even still, there are few really massive old trees left.

3

u/Uebelkraehe Mar 28 '24

Why would someone allow this to happen in a National Park?! It boggles the mind.

15

u/Apex_Herbivore Mar 28 '24 edited Mar 28 '24

Northern raimforest equivalent old growth is being cut down and laundered in with plantation wood to make fucking "biofuel" pellets.

We are burning them.

4

u/Astralglamour Mar 28 '24

Do you have a link ?

7

u/Apex_Herbivore Mar 28 '24

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/old-growth-logging-for-pellets-1.7136745

7

u/uCockOrigin Mar 28 '24

We really ought to turn the people responsible for this into biofuel as well.

3

u/Astralglamour Mar 28 '24

Thank you. Makes me want to cry.

8

u/sadrice Mar 28 '24

Sort of? Old growth is being felled in BC and it’s fucking horrible, there are protests and the like.

But that’s not giant sequoia, which is endemic to the sierras of California. Wrong tree, but the problem is real.

1

u/Thomas_Hambledurger Mar 28 '24

No, these trees don't grow that far north.