Below the Feet of a Giant

At the foot of a giant, I dug a little soil test hole a few days ago. I was in a remote stand of massive coast redwoods—one of the most northern great groves of the magnificent trees in the southern reaches of coastal Oregon. Clouds drifted through the treetops, and whitewater cascades poured over the steep and ever-verdant slopes. 

High level winds caressed the feathery tops of the giants. There was only stillness on the forest floor. Occasional shafts of sunlight found their way to where we were, but those beams were few and far between. 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, as Robert Frost once wrote. 

The trees were incredible, not only in sheer scale, but in our human reaction. I found it out-of-place to call out, or even speak loudly when in the ancient groves as if in some sacred hall of a cathedral. I recalled walking through the sanctuary of St. Patricks in New York. It wasn’t during a mass; it was on a weekday. Caryl and I just ascended the marble treads off 5^th Avenue and stepped in through the massive oaken doors one winter day.

 Although there were perhaps 40 sojourners in there, they all whispered or walked silently. It was like that in the redwoods. I wouldn’t quite call it reverence—it’s more like respect for the ancients. Coast redwoods bear the scientific name of Sequioa sempervirens. The last part says just what they are: always green, or alive. They are indeed ancient, when compared to our human existence. They can live for as much as 4000 years, and they are thought to be among the most massive organisms on Earth. Some specimens in California’s coastal forests exceed 370 feet tall and 22 feet in diameter. 

By my own forester-trained geometric calculations on the volume of a tapered cylinder, the average tonnage of just one redwood tree in the forest Caryl and I were walking in was about 157 tons, about the same weight as 4 semi loads of solid rock. It’s a little unnerving when standing inside a burned out thin-looking shell of a tree at ground level, and the massive living tree still extends hundreds of feet above with all of that weight overhead. 

I tried not to think about it.

It was common in this extreme northern grove to walk by trees over 12 feet in diameter and 270 feet in height. Certainly, they are smaller at this extreme end of their range, but even the Douglas-fir that were just errand page boys sharing the stand with the redwood kings were often over 7 feet in diameter.

All had been through wars and rumors of wars of their very own (I don’t think a redwood gives two wits about our wars): each tree bore scars of bravely standing strong through wildfire. Caryl noted some charcoal as high as 40 feet on several trees. These were hot fires blown by late summer winds and all of the forest besides the giants that stood their ground succumbed. 

Some had completely burn-hollowed out bases, nice handy shelters for groups of intrepid forest seeking humans to completely get out of the rain. Despite all the scar tissue, the ancients held on, still putting out leaves, cones and stump-spouts, sheltering and providing possibility for the next generation of trees. 

For the next 2000 years. Trees take the long view.

Their roots can spread in an entangled network, latching on to adjacent redwoods in a given grove more than 100 feet from a given tree. But here’s the kicker: they’ll often only go 6 to 12 feet deep. 

Why? I had to know. In our grasslands, roots can easily go as much as 8 to 10 feet down. That is in a treeless grassland, mind you. I figured that the trees could conceivably range much further downward, deep into bedrock clefts where an intrepid soil scientist may find deep deposits of organic matter left there by the greatest of trees.

I imagined that the humic layer—the black, “chocolate cake” part would go up to several feet deep at a bare minimum. After all, on the ranch, I’ve found earthworms—the intrepid workers of organic matter consumption and process– wriggling in spaghetti bowl-like masses at 8 feet below our grazing meadows. 

I’ve dug backhoe holes in our ranch’s apparently impervious clayey, volcanic ash soils and found dark matter—not the intergalactic stuff of the universe, but better, a.k.a. humus, that black stuff you like to see in a potted plant—as deep as 20 inches below where our cows walk. 

So I figured that in this ancient primeval forest, untouched except by fire since the last ice age around 10,000 years ago, would have a very healthy deposition of not inches of organic/humic matter, but feet. After all, over all that time, plants were growing, depositing leaves, needles, cones and twigs. Then there was the moss, ferns and lichens. Then there were animals, alive and decaying, and fecal matter of all shapes and sizes deposited by everything from Roosevelt elk, to spotted owls and newts, salamanders and slugs. 

Maybe we would have to measure it in meters. Or perhaps, the organic matter would go all the way to bedrock, that place of Flintstone fame, and would only halt because of running into the proverbial brick wall of solid volcanic parent material.

In which case, I would still be digging today. 

But nature never does the expected. And I should have known better. 

But here it is, anyway: 1 inch. Yep. After pulling away the duff, and digging through a very short black layer of humus, I had only gotten to one inch—the beginning of the “A” horizon, in soil terms. 

In the “A” layer, there is still a little organic matter in the soil, but it is mostly—by far, obviously straight clay, and gravels. It was gray, not black, and I could mold little objects out of the gray marl. My guess is that it was 98% clay. But that organic layer was only an inch, or perhaps 2 inches at most. Below that, there was no “chocolate cake” humus.

My mouth hit the forest floor, as did Caryl’s. And this wasn’t an anomaly. Several more soil scratchings revealed similar results. There was little to no soil accumulation of organic matter. 

I’ve read numerous articles and heard various experts speak time and again about how important conifer forests are for carbon sequestration. They do in fact tie up huge amounts of carbon, but most of it is above ground. Since most of the value in the soil is near the top, the roots maximize their access to that layer—and stretch out over great distances.

Our grasslands, on the other hand, place carbon well below the soil surface.  

Here’s a surprise: after sitting at my desk for an hour or so, and looking at my organic calculation spreadsheets, I arrived at a very intriguing thought: despite the huge quantity of biomass tonnage found above ground in these forests, old growth conifer forests and intact grasslands can pack similar amounts of biomass underground. I’ve done the math, taking our most regenerated soils on the ranch, at 17.7 percent organic matter.

Those soils basically equate to the amount of organic matter in the old-growth redwood forest we had been walking in on a per acre basis. Both have somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 to 150 tons per acre of biomass underground.

I know it doesn’t seem like it could be possible, but I’ve done the math twice. It’s pretty easy, once you’ve done all the carbon numbers like we have. Grasslands can be as powerful at storing water and carbon as old growth forests. And by mimicking the grazing of wild species like bison, we can use cows to make it happen. And when we do that, we can fix water cycles, rainfall patterns and even desertification.

Wait, what? Cows can be agents of change instead of destruction? Well, yes.

Can cows save the planet? Heck, yeah.

Happy Trails.