2010 is already looking like an exciting year for us and hopefully for you as well. There are several events coming up soon and we hope to see you there. Here are some dates and info:

Feb. 12 Brian French will be speaking at the Ontario ISA Chapter conference in Niagara Falls. This presentation will focus on Oregon’s largest trees, how we measure and document them and what we do with the information we collect. For more information visit http://www.isaontario.com/conference/conference.php or look at the blip in the Ontario Arborist.

Feb. 20 and 27  The short documentary ‘Ascending the Giants’ will be playing at the 33rd Portland International Film Fest on these dates. Will and Brian will be there for a Q and A at the showing on the 20th only (we'll be in the field measuring trees the next weekend). If you're going to be in Portland you don't want to miss it. See the exact showtimes and locations at http://nwfilm.org/festivals/piff/

Feb. 21 Brian French and Will Koomjain will be presenting at the Columbia Gorge Interpretive Center in Stevenson, WA. The event will begin at 2:00 PM and adjourn at 3:00. Parties present will be welcome to join in on a potluck following the Ascending the Giants presentation. Here is a flyer.

March 9 Will and Brian speak at Nature Night at the Portland Audubon Society.  We'll discuss out experiences and adventures documenting some of the world’s largest trees and the wildlife that depends on them. The presentation begins at 7:00. Please visit http://audubonportland.org for more information.


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Hey all!  On February 11th Oregon Field Guide will air what will no doubt be a fascinating segment onour new state champion Limber Pine.  The tree was discovered growing on a steep, rocky slope of Cusick Mt in the Eagle Cap Wilderness.  What is really exciting though, is that this tree could be the oldest living tree in the Pacific Northwest.  While the jury is still out on the age of the champion, another tree from the grove has already been confirmed at over 2000 years old, outliving the record of 1834 years for  Alaska Yellow Cedar.

The story will air at 8:30pm on Feb. 11th on OPB, and will be rebroadcast on Feb. 14th at 6:30pm.  You will also be able to stream segments of the show, including the one about the old Limber Pine, at the Oregon Field Guide website, or read about it and look at a great slideshow on our website.

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The Rest of the Story

Well, it's been a bit since I updated the story of my Indonesian tree hunting adventure.  OK, more than a bit.  Many of you who have followed my trip I've had the pleasure of personally updating, but many other I have not.  So, without further ado, here is The Rest of The Story.

After the hectic but ultimately successful month in Borneo (see Success! blog post), I returned to Yogyakarta to finish my language studies.  While it was certainly nice to have some of the conveniences of Java (access to english language books and magazines chief among them), I missed the wildness of Borneo.  A scant 3 weeks later, I was hopping on a plane for Manado, the capitol of the Minihasa region of North Sulawesi.

Manado is a strange place, being closer to the Philippines than to any other Indonesian cities.  It still has all of the chaos and confusion of a typical Indonesian city, but because of its heritage as the capitol of a region and of a people, it has much more a sense of place than the costal cities of Borneo, which are full of Javanese immigrants and feel as though they could be anywhere.  There was also less of the palpable tension between old and new that exists on Borneo.  Modernization is bringing changes to daily life, the environment, and the ethnic makeup of the place, but all these changes are happening at a much slower pace than in Borneo.  This is probably due to Sulawesi's relatively poorer stock of natural resources and further distance from the major population centers of Java.

After getting aquatinted with the place, I set off on a relatively fruitless search for Agathis trees in the Tankoko National Park of North Sulawesi.  I saw a few, all small, and couldn't search the higher elevation areas, where I expected the larger trees to be due to restrictions on off-trail hiking for foreign nationals.  (I was told, straight-faced, by the park supervisior that it was no problem; all I had to do was go to Jakarta and fill out some forms).  I planned my next tree expedition for remote Eastern Sulawesi, in a place called Morowali Nature Reserve.  Before I started the two day boat trip to the nearest town I couldn't resist getting in some scuba/snorkel time on Pulau Bunaken, famous as one of the best scuba diving spots in the world.

Eastern Sulawesi was an incredibly relaxing place to be.  Being semi-fluent in bahasa Indonesia already, it felt liberating to again be someplace where no one was expecting to see a white foreigner.  After making arraingments for a guide, we set off on the all-day boat trip to Morowali.  A hilarious series of boat rides later, with each boat getting progressively smaller and less seaworthy, we were finally hiking through the most beautiful floodplain meadow I've ever seen to a native stilt house where we would spend the night.

The nature reserve, strangely, is set up as much to protect the native peoples who live there as the wildlife.  The orang Wana who I stayed with use shifting agriculture to grow most of their food, but get their rice and other outside supplies by selling Dammar (the dried sap of Agathis trees) to middlemen who sell it in town.  In many ways, their entire way of life is sustained by Dammar.  My interest in Agathis trees made me an instant friend.  Everyone, from the old men to the little children was happy to talk about Agathis trees and the location of good groves.

I spent a week and a half trekking around to different villages and going on Dammar collecting expeditions.  The orang Wana harvest Dammar by hacking a slit in to the side of an Agathis tree, then returning in a month or so to collect the dried sap which has collected under the wound.  This method doesn't kill the tree, and they only harvest from healthy mature trees.  They explained to me that harvesting from trees that are too young can stunt them, preventing them from becoming productive, and harvesting from older trees sometimes kills them while bringing relatively little sap in return.

So while the natives went on their runs, I followed along and measured the older, larger trees.  I would say the orang Wana were the nicest, most hospitable people I met in my entire time in Indonesia, but it seems that I could (and have) said that exact same thing about any number of different villages or groups.  One thing which did strike me as unique was the more open, laid back attitude of the people.  Compared to other Indonesian cultures I had been exposed to (especially the Javanese), the orang Wana I knew were very informal and frank.  It was a quite conspicuous difference from the masculine camraderie of the Dayaks I stayed with and the structured good manners of Javanese.  This difference struck home with me when I asked one of the guides, a middle-aged man I had just met two days prior, about his dour expression, and he proceeded to tell me about his various difficulties and disagreements with his wife.  His honesty and obvious agony over the situation I found rather touching, and I ended up letting him off a couple days early with full pay so he could go home and work things out with his wife.

After a hectic time trying to get to a major city to catch a flight out of Sulawesi, I stopped in Jakarta to wrap up loose ends, sort and pack all my stuff and say goodbye to my friends there.  Then it was off to Hong Kong.  I had arranged to work for Asia Tree Preservation, a high quality tree preservation company run by 3 Americans which works all throughout Asia.  The month and a half that I spent working with them was great fun and very interesting work.  It provided a much needed buffer between the total 'stranger in a strange land' experience of Indonesia and returning to my life in Oregon.  Only in retrospect did I realize how harsh this transition would have been without the slow easing back in to routine and domesticity that working in Hong Kong provided.

And that's the rest of the story.  I'm now back in Portland, climbing trees again for Peacock Tree Preservation and trying like hell to keep my bahasa Indonesia skills fresh.  After so long, it may be natural to ask 'why update now?'  Well, I want to get the rest of the story down because it looks like the narrative is gonna have a sequel: myself and Brian French are in negotiations to go to Hong Kong for several months this summer to work for Asia Tree Preservation, and are planning to use the proximity to do more international tree documenting.  India is a likely destination this time, but I definitely think that my this trip needs to include a return to the islands of Indonesia.  In documenting trees of the Araucaria family, to call this first trip just scratching the surface would be generous.  Some of my priorities I want to pursue for next time will be (time and money permitting) visits to the Agathis labillardieri groves of West Papua and Araucaria hunsteinii in Papua New Guinea.

As this next chapter begins to take shape, we'll keep the blog updated with the latest info on our plans and thoughts.

-Will


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Oregon Big Tree Registry

Over the past 2 years Ascending the
Giants has visited and measured most
of the National Champion trees in
Oregon. This task has taken us to all
four corners of the state and through
our travels we have met many
wonderful people and big tree
enthusiasts.
National Champion Narrowleaf
Cottonwood


Sauvie Island's National Champion Black Walnut

Late last year, the National Center for Conservation Science and Policy and the Oregon Department of Forestry asked if we would be interested in becoming the official Big-Tree Coordinators for the State of Oregon. Although we were initially surprised by the
request, we have gladly accepted the job and are extremely excited to have the chance
to maintain this important archive and part of Oregon history.

With our mission of promoting Big Tree awareness through adventure photography,
videography and education, we plan to host the database on our website and have
content available to the public by October of 2009. There have been many exciting developments since the inception of our state's registry in the 1940’s. One new change
you may recognize will be a section for archival documents and photographs from the colorful history of Oregon's Champion Tree Program. Of course, our most important goal will be improving the registry today and into the future. We plan to do this by including more information, more photographs and by removing outdated or incorrect information from listings. We hope that these changes will make the Registry easier and more rewarding to use, encouraging more people to get involved in measuring and preserving trees in their community. We are truly excited to be the new stewards for this program, and we encourage you to let us know what you want to see in our state's Big Tree Registry.

(right) National Champion Big Leaf Maple

What would make the Registry more useful for you?
Would you like to participate in the program?

Write us at info@ascendingthegiants.com and let us know what you want to see in the future.

For the Big Trees,

Brian French and Will Koomjian

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After over a year of planning, and far more than that of dreaming and saving up, I can't name or explain the thoughts racing through my head as our 4X4 slowly worked its way up the mountains of the Borneo interior. At some point, the soil changed and what had been a dark, dense forest filled with ferns and vines opened up into sparse, open patches with only a few small trees. I started seeing insectivorous pitcher plants the size of Coke bottles, and then before I could prepare myself we turned a corner and there they were.

"Holy crap! Look at that!"

I was doubly startled by the long-awaited sight of the Agathis trees and by the realization that this was the most English I'd spoken in nearly three weeks.

Amidst the scrubby, rocky landscape of the Kerangas were a few towering pillars, looking like giant pinwheels with the wheel turned and facing up. They looked like something out of Dr. Seuss, and I remembered the line from "The Lorax" when the Once-ler first moves to the forest:

"But those trees, those trees, those Truffula trees!
All my life I'd been searching for trees such as these."

When we finally arrived at our camp, on the top of a bald ridge at roughly 1700m elevation, I was as a dog on a long road trip practically clawing at the windows to get out. By this time it was six thirty in the evening, and not wanting to waste a moment of daylight I rushed off alone to a promising looking tree down ridge from our camp. In retrospect, I'm not quite sure why I chose this tree; from the road one can only see the top third of the crown, and that only looks average. Something in the stoutness of those top branches made me curious, and 30 minutes later when the base of the tree came into view I could see my instinct was correct. Barely out of the gate I found a big one: measurement showed it to be over 5 ft in diameter, one and a half times the size of an average mature specimen, and nearly 150 ft tall.

The rest of our searching turned up nothing as spectacular as this; alot of groves of 3.5 ft or slighly larger trees near the 16km strech of road we were searching from, until, having met back up with the trucks on their way back, I forced the convoy to stop at something I'd only caught a glance of as we drove in. It turned out to be a multi-stemmed, 1.7 m thick giant, very healthy and relatively young. The convoy graciously waited as I made all the necessary measurements and notes and as we finally started the long slog back to the village I felt more relaxed than I've felt in months. Even the ever present leeches spilling into the cab from the overhanging foliage didn't bother me.

The total time, one way, to get to this particular spot on the globe from Samarinda (the nearest decent sized city) was roughly 10 days, from the 17th to the 27th of April. From Samarinda I took a bus to Sengatta, from there a minivan to Muara Wahau as the road was too bad off for buses to pass. I thought the road approaching Sengatta was bad, but soon found out I had yet to learn what a bad road means in Kalimantan. We were stuck for 9 hours in ridiculously hot weather waiting for a passage of road to be fixed with roughly 500 other people, some of whom had been waiting for three days. After arriving at the village I had to wait for 4 days for the rain to stop long enough for the road to be a road and not a huge mud puddle, and then after another full day travelling had to wait another 2 and a half days for trucks to be repaired. Although the waiting nearly drove me to despair (expecially at the thought of having to return without completing my journey) each time the absurdly bad state of the road ahead made me understand why one would not want to attempt to travel with questionable weather or vehicles.

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Means 'Come on, let's go to the forest!' in bahasa Indonesia, and is what I'll be doing starting tomorrow. The forest in question is a super-remote little gem of a forest roughly 100 km Northwest of the town of Muara Wahau (read far from anything). The site was a timber concession that the company never pursued past the road-building phase because, apparenly, during road-building they realized how remote the spot was and that they would lose all their profit in trasport costs. Of course, the same things that have protected the forest from becoming timber also make it difficult and expensive for me to reach. Notably, one must cross a major river on a cable (hand over hand, legs in the water) and then hire a 4X4 that stays on the far side of the river. This is the only transport on that side of the river, and you can bet he charges a mint for his services!

As for the forest, it has some really impressive nearly pure Agathis stands according to folks who've been there. Likely these are due to a combination of elevation and soil conditions which inhibit the usually dominant broadleaf trees such as dipterocarp. This area includes the divide between the watersheds of two major river systems, the Mahakam and the Kayan, and has one of the lowest population densities on the island of Borneo. Because of the absence of humans and, strangly, also Orangutans in an area that can support them, the site is being considered for releasing formerly captive Orangutans.

Will post more about the area, including photos, when I return from this trip. Last week I was in an area not far from this as the crow flies, but very far by every other method of transport. Near the coast of the (notorious) Makassar Strait is Kutai National Park, one of the last stands of costal lowland hardwood forest in Kalimantan. The park has been the focus of much of the news you may have heard about encroachmen of Borneo's protected areas due illegal logging and land clearing. Despite widespread destruction caused by these activites, the Indonesian government has wisely resisted the pressure to give up on the park, and it is currently home to a healthy population of wild Orangutans and a small but growing eco-tourism economy.

I spent four days there (not counting the full day trips there and back) and found the place amazing. Despite being only accesible by boat, it is not very expensive or difficult to reach. During the daily treks through the jungle, which were a healthy mix of on trail hiking and off trail bushwhacking, I learned a ton about local flora and fauna from the guides; which vine you can cut for water, which tree sap you can start a fire with, etc. I also saw a wild Orangutan, went fishing and played lots of chess with the guides.

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Well, the big plan is starting to take shape.  On Monday I fly back to the town of Yogyakarta in Central Java, a place I know and love.  After two weeks of additional language study I'll be off to Balikpapan in East Kalimantan to meet with some extremely nice folks who work in conservation to talk trees.  With some good language skills and advice about locations of good groves, I should be ready to start the field work in earnest.  The trees that I will be measuring here will be Agathis borneesis, one of the few modern members of the Araucaiaceae that can grow at lower elevations.  It is able to compete in the lowlands when it grows in areas with nutrient-poor soils.  These areas are called heath forests or kerangas, and are also a center for biodiversity of insect-eating plants (again because of the soils.)

Not only do I plan on recording every piece of information on the trees that I visit, but in addition I'll be recording every scrap of beta on groves that I can't make it to.  I expect this will prove valuable for the next trip, and I am fully confident that there can be a next trip if it proves necessary.

After this, I'll be returning to Yogyakarta for more language classes and to plan the next leg of the trip.  This leg will take me to Indonesian Papua to look at Agathis labillardieri, then to Papua New Guinea to look at the fantastic and remarkable Araucaria hunsteinii.  Unfortunately, the first species grows mostly on the Northwest corner of this island, and the second grows in the Southeast corner.  Transport to and around these areas is generally expensive and time-consuming, and modern comforts are a long way off.  I'm hoping that by this point that my financial, health and visa situations will all be going well, because this is really no place to go unprepared.

-Will

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These are a few notes on life in Indonesia that I jotted down while living in Yogyakarta.  Promise I'll have a more substantial post soon detailing some of my recent travels and future plans.  Next week I've got to fly to Malaysia to get my new Indonesian visa (what? yes.) and should have plenty of free time to update all of you on what's going on.

-Will

-Hybrid words in bahasa Indonesia remind me of German: a hospital is a rumah sakit (sick house), a lunch is makanan siang (midday food), tears are air masa (eye water) and best of all an orangutan is literally orang (person) and hutan (forest). Same way you would say a laotian is an orang Laos, an orangutan is a person from the forest. Bahasa Indonesia treats orangutans (and only orangutans) as people, not as animals.

-To say pine tree in bahasa Indonesia you say pohon pinus. Since i's sound like hard e's in Indonesian, when I try to answer questions about what I'm doing in Indonesia to someone who knows a little english (esp. swear words) it sounds like I'm saying that I'm studying penis trees. This is the source of much amusement to the men I talk to.

-Pollution here is really out of control. Folks drive around with cars and scooters belching out acrid smoke. Most scooter drivers wear bandanas on their faces to protect their lungs. This country needs an environmental awakening really badly, but unfortunately such issues don't even register for most people. The prevailing attitude towards pollution or trash or even deforestation is similar to things like AIDS or traffic in Jakarta; universally acknowledged to be bad things but impossible to fix. There are glimmers of hope, and one definately has the sense that eco-conciousness is increasing rather than decreasing, but there is still very far to go.

-Indonesia needs urban trees worse than anyplace I've ever seen. The amount of good that could be done towards cleaing the air, preventing erosion and providing shelter from the harsh sunlight and frequent downpours here is hard to overstate. For real it makes me want to buy a shovel and some saplings. Of couse this would do more good if it wasn't so common for urban trees (especially in Jakarta) to get mercilessly topped every few years. -It is very common here for street trees to be planted directly in the street in a tiny hole in the pavement, ala 'I Heart Huckabees'. Cars park around them. It's crazy. I'll post photos.

-Many of the sidewalks here are glossy tile interspersed with aggregate, and the sidewalk has these steep ramps every 5-10 feet where it goes up or down like two feet. The tile is next to impossible to have any traction on when it's wet, and during the wet season (now) it rains several times a day. Fortunately everyone walks on the road, and the sidewalks are mostly for stalls selling satays and chicken noodle soup.

-Indonesians eat chicken noodle soup everyday and do not believe that it makes you feel better when sick. They have stronger treatments for that, some that make sense like drinking a delicious herbal ginger tea, and some more dubious ones: vinigar and chili based infusion that you snort to clear your sinuses, and smoking enourmous, unfiltered kretek (clove) cigarettes to clear your lungs.

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No doubt.

I've been living in Yogyakarta now for four days and am loving every minute.  The dreaded months long post-dengue fever haze that I was warned of has failed to materialize, and I have been taking bahasa Indonesia courses for three days now and studying in most of my free time.  I'm getting very good with written language; I can decipher most any written passage, but understanding what folks are saying is another matter.  Slang and adopted words, mainly corrupted english, french, javanese and sundanese are peppered in everyday speech and make comprehension very difficult.  On the plus side I'm meeting lots of locals and am being forced to constantly practice.

I bought a sweet old raleigh commuter bike for dirt cheap yesterday and am using it to get to school and around town.  It's from the 50's and super heavy, with a back wheel stand and a type of integrated frame lock that I've never seen before.  The lock looks like a single handcuff mounted on the seat stays that passes a bar around the back wheel when you turn the key.  I think maybe only other bikers can understand how much having your own bike makes you feel good; I'm independant without having the expense or trouble of a car and I don't have to haggle with becak (bicycle taxi) drivers or try to figure out the bus system.  Plus everytime I get turned around I end up in some fascinating back road that's too narrow for cars; only scooter and bike traffic is allowed.

I'm planning to stay here for roughly two more weeks working on language, then maybe spend a week traveling to some other spots in Java, and then stop by Jakarta again before heading out into the field to see some trees.

I highly encourage all of you to google image search the temples at Borobudur and Prambanan.  Seeing photos of these places years ago on the internet helped convince me to come here, and both sites are within 40 kilometers of Yogyakarta.  I plan to visit both places shortly.

-Will

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It's been a while I know, but I'm finally back in the game. After a week and a half long Dengue fever haze, I feel (more or less) back to the land of the living. If any of you have had Dengue fever before, then you know how much fun I've been having lately, and if you haven't had it I would suggest you try to keep it that way.

As if the fevers and nausea weren't enough to shake ones confidence, your hands, feet and face turn bright red from burst capillaries. I discovered an interesting side effect of this is that your gums become purple and tender so that when you try to brush your teeth your mouth instantly fills with blood. Pleasant.

Anyhow, I'm glad to be putting all that behind me finally, and starting next week I will be moving to Yogyakarta in central Java. Yogyakarta is the cultural and spiritual center of Java, and is also an excellent place to enroll in an intensive study Bahasa Indonesia course, which is what I intend to do. This country has an almost endless ability to confuse, and I'm realizing that time spent improving my language skills will be richly rewarded later. I'll post more about this when I've arrived and gotten settled.

-Will

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Woweeeeeee. After 36+ hours of Singapore airlines hospitality and the jet-setter modernity of the San Francisco, Hong Kong and Singapore international terminals, Jakarta is a body blow to my weakened state.  I can see why The Economist has named this the worst city to fly in to for business many of the last ten years. (side note: the only serious competition for this dubious prize has come from Port Moresby, the capitol of Papua New Guinea, where I also plan to go).

Considering this is the capitol and largest city of the fourth most populous country on earth, it's pretty striking how small and ill-equipped the airport is.  Also, to say the streets here are chaotic would be to understate the situation to the point of absurdity.  On the short drive from the airport I had to look away three different times because I thought I was about to see a pedestrian run over. Each time the disaster was averted by centimeters and neither party seemed particularly worried.

Now, after taking a real Indonesian-style shower (no shower curtain, mount for the nozzle or hot water) and taking a hilarious photo of myself looking confounded by the choices I've made, I think it's time to call it a day(s).  I'll post the photo soon as I get a good Internet connection.

-Will

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One week to go and so much still to do. From procuring last minute items to moving out of my house to cramming as much Indonesian into my brain as possible I'm pretty swamped these days.

Underlying all the activity is a slowly rising feeling of excitement, a sense that I can almost touch these things that I have spent so long setting into motion. The inevitability of it all is exhilarating. I imagine this is how one must feel after building an airplane; nothing left to do but get in and see if it flies.

Monday the 12th of January is day 1: I fly out of Seattle in the evening, then go to San Francisco, Hong Kong, Singapore and finally Jakarta, arriving sometime on the 14th. I've enclosed a photo, probably the last from this side of the Pacific, of my backpack and all the stuff that's going in it.

Note to people in Oregon: Monday, January 5's Oregonian has a great story about my expedition. They even talked to Dr. Chris Earle of The Gymnosperm Database! Check it out in the main section of the paper, or online here.

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Hello friends, supporters, colleagues and big tree enthusiasts of all stripes. This is the first installment of the Ascending the Giants blog. In this irregularly updated section we hope to keep all of you out there who keep this project energetic and meaningful current on what we are up to. The idea is to keep up on what we’re working on right now and hope to do in the future, as opposed to most of the rest of the website which chronicles expeditions we have already done. In everything we do we have come to appreciate how the public can improve a project with new knowledge and insights. We hope that by keeping the public better informed of our endeavors that the level of feedback and public involvement will also increase.

Being naturally restless, we are preparing for an exciting time in which we expect to see Ascending the Giants change and come into maturity, from a loose volunteer group to an organization capable of creating sustained interest in big tree preservation worldwide.

Some of the things we will be writing about in the coming months will be our efforts to become a federally recognized non-profit organization, plans to update every national champion tree in our home state of Oregon, and re-vamping the Oregon Big Tree Registry. In addition, this blog will keep you informed about the latest ATG media, like Freesolo Photography’s amazing canopy photos, videos from Uncage the Soul, and an upcoming Ascending the Giants champion trees exhibit. In the interest of not ruining the surprise, we’ll end there for today, but rest assured that all this and more things we are doing will be explained in time.

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