World’s largest sugar pine discovered in Yosemite

On August 25, 2024, big tree hunters Michael Taylor, Carl Casey and Martin Crawford measured a massive sugar pine that they knew about in Yosemite National Park. The team calculated that it was not only the largest known sugar pine, but the largest pine tree on Earth.

I recently spoke with Taylor – who is the original and lead “discoverer” of this and many other champion trees and has recently pioneered that use of LiDAR to find tall trees – about how he found this incredible sugar pine. He initially put it very simply and said, “It has an unusual background, actually.”

He then proceeded to relate an almost unbelievable discovery story.

“I went to Yosemite with my high school on a Christmas vacation trip in 1981. So I went up to the park with 15 or 20 other students. We took a bus up to Yosemite and we stayed at Crane Flat and did some cross country skiing and we went down to this cabin to see the giant sequoias. We hiked in the snow, down to a cabin – and that was the ranger station down in Merced Grove. I remember that I walked off into the forest by myself and found this giant sugar pine!”

He paused to think that this all had happened roughly 43 years ago, reflected incredulously, and then went on to say, “I remember that when I was walking down to see the giant sequoia, I was actually more impressed by the sugar pine. For some reason, I loved the sloooow, tapering, columnar trunks [of the sugar pines].” He slowed down and pronounced these last three words with deep feeling. “There was something about the sugar pine that just enthralled me. I just love the tree, for some reason.”

Which is exactly how love is. It’s hard to describe why we love what we love, but we can feel it and we know it when we feel it.

Taylor grew up in California – the perfect breeding grounds for a tree-lover – and has always had a deep affinity for trees. The story of his youthful fascination with large and tall trees, which subsequently led to his lifelong passion and career as a preeminent “big tree hunter” is well-described in The Wild Trees by Richard Preston. I had read the book – which tells the spellbinding story of how Taylor, Chris Atkins and Steve Sillett co-discovered the tallest tree on Earth, a Coast redwood in Redwood National Park – before getting to know and work alongside Taylor, so his story rang astonishingly true. Of course he had felt drawn to wander off into the trees away from the rest of the group and had stumbled upon a huge tree! Finding the biggest trees in the world is Taylor’s true destiny and unique gift.

Possibly because there are so many billions of trees for a tree hunter to get distracted by, it took decades before Taylor returned to the Merced Grove on a mission to find large and tall sugar pine for the Park Service in 2015.

He humorously described this trip in almost identical terms as his teenage high school trip: “So I walk off into the forest and, sure enough, I find this giant sugar pine!”

(Only Taylor just strolls into the forest and inadvertently bumps into the biggest possible tree.)

He didn’t have the right tools to measure tree height with him, but he took the diameter at breast height (DBH) and it wasn’t quite large enough to register as a champion tree. “But,” he said, “I remember it was quite tall, and I just remember being incredibly impressed by this tree and thinking that it just had to be the same one I found when I was a kid.” He also retained his teenage hunch that this tree had to be the biggest sugar pine.

Taylor informed the Park Service and fellow tree enthusiasts, including Casey, about the tree and its significant heft but, again, years passed before he was back in the area.

Then, on August 25th, 2024, he was planning to measure a mega tall red fir with Casey and Crawford. Unfortunately, the gate to the road they wanted to drive down was locked, so the team had to change plans. Taylor suggested that they visit and measure the giant sugar pine he’d long been wondering about.

When the men came upon the tree, they found that the Park Service had located the tree and done a beautiful job of clearing the area around the base of the tree for fire protection and to help the monarch thrive and grow with less competition from other trees and plants. This also made it easier for them to get to the base of the tree to take their measurements.

They measured the DBH at 8.7 feet  and the height at 236 feet – neither of which were record-breaking figures – but as Taylor used his relascope to take more measurements and calculate the tree’s total volume of wood, his appreciation for the enormous mass of the tree grew and grew. The trunk had very little taper.

Taylor recounted, “At 170 feet, it was still 4 feet in diameter. And at 200 feet, it is still a really big tree! So I was realizing that this tree has got to be pushing the record for volume!”

Trees can be measured in many different ways: height and DBH are the two most common, straightforward and well-known measurements.

Tree volume – which can be thought of as “the amount of wood in a tree” – is more complicated but is the best description of how “large” a tree is. Volume needs to be calculated from multiple measurements that must also account for the trunk’s taper (the base is always wider than the top of the tree) or even take all of the branches into consideration. Different methods and formulae can be used to calculate tree volume. A tree climber can take hundreds of tedious measurements, but ground-based LiDAR devices are increasingly being employed to scan a tree for volume measurements. These devices and the software that processes the terabytes of data created by the sensors as they collect a “point cloud” from which to calculate volume are getting more accurate all the time. They also require powerful supercomputers to crunch the data.

Taylor uses less high-tech methods, but he still had to get back to his home computer to do the volume calculations. His result for the tree that he and Casey and Crawford lovingly dubbed the “Mossy Creek Giant” (for it happily taps a creek with mossy banks): 5,761 cubic feet.

At this size, the Mossy Creek Giant handily became not just the largest known sugar pine, but the largest known pine in the world. The previous record-holder was a ponderosa pine with a volume of 5,450 cubic feet. Two other sugar pines over 5,400 cubic feet are right at the top of the list for the largest pines on Earth, too.

When asked how it felt to identify this tree as the largest known sugar pine and pine, Taylor readily replied, “It confirmed my love for sugar pines.”

Given all of his incredible forays and big tree findings over the years, it is also significant that the Mossy Creek Giant is also officially Taylor’s “oldest big tree discovery.” The teenage Taylor was certainly onto something – and he’s never given up his fascination, drive and belief that “There is always a bigger tree… around the next bend, over the next hill and in the next valley.”

If there is another, bigger tree to be found out there, Taylor is the man to find it.

If you also love sugar pines and would like to plant seedlings with the Sugar Pine Foundation this fall, dates and locations for October and November plantings are on their website Calendar.