The Eastern Hemlock tree has often been described as the Redwood of the East.

This is the realm of the Coast Redwood tree.

Redwoods grow very slowly in their tops.

And then it bursts into a forest of Redwoods.

The blue whale, it's a dwarf if compared with the real biggest creature that exists on the planet that is, this wonderful, magnificent Sequoiadendron giganteum.

If a portion of a Redwood is rotting, the Redwood will send roots into its own form and draw nutrients out of itself as it falls apart.

To us, when we look at a Redwood tree, it seems to be motionless and still, and yet Redwoods are constantly in motion, moving upward into space, articulating themselves and filling Redwood space over Redwood time, over thousands of years.

A Redwood is a fractal. And as they put out limbs, the limbs burst into small trees, copies of the Redwood.

You can see the range of the Coast Redwoods. It's here, in red.

Steve Sillett, when he was a 19 year old college student at Reed College, had heard that the Redwood forest canopy is considered to be a so called Redwood desert.

The Redwood species seems to exist in another kind of time not human time, but what we might call Redwood time.

Think about this tree, rising upward into Redwood space, 325 feet, 32 stories, an individual living organism articulating its forms upward into space over long periods of time.

But it's believed that the oldest living Redwoods are perhaps 2,500 years old roughly the age of the Parthenon although it's also suspected that there may be individual trees that are older than that.

And this is a living organism that has a mass of at least 2,000 tons.

Redwood time moves at a more stately pace than human time.

What can the Redwoods tell us about ourselves?

And maybe about here, about 30 feet, is the diameter of a big Redwood.

But curiously, Redwood rainforests, the fragments that we have left, to this day remain under explored.

We're looking at the very top of Gaya, which is thought to be the oldest Redwood.

I'm going to ask you to imagine what a Redwood really is as a living organism.

That is to say, at that time it was believed that there was nothing up there except the branches of Redwood trees.

We're going to show you what the diameter at breast height of a big Redwood is.

And yet, when you look at the base of a Redwood tree, you're not seeing the organism.

And if we had Redwood like biology, we would have six layers of people on our hands, as it were.

Redwood rainforest is incredibly difficult to move through, and even today, individual trees are being discovered that have never been seen before, including, in the summer of 2006, Hyperion, the world's tallest tree.

Redwoods have an enormous surface area that extends upward into space because they have a propensity to do something called reiteration.

Even so, about four percent of the primeval Redwood rainforest remains intact, wild and now protected entirely protected in a chain of small parks strung out like pearls along the north coast of California, including Redwood National Park.

The L.A. Times actually turned to Twitter to dispense information as well, and put a Twitter feed on the front page, and the L.A. Fire Department and Red Cross used it to dispense news and updates as well.

They're finding out that Redwoods can move moisture out of the air and down into their trunks, possibly all the way into their root systems.

Now, here we see a reiteration in Chronos, one of the older Redwoods.

There are two people climbing this tree, Gaya, which is thought to be one of the oldest Redwoods. There they are.

And with a friend of his, he took it upon himself to free climb a Redwood without ropes or any equipment to see what was up there.

What they're doing in the Redwood forest canopy soil hundreds of feet above the ocean, or how they got there, is completely unknown.

This is the Fortingall Yew no, I'm just kidding this is the Fortingall Yew.

Though when the Dodgers abandoned us to come to L.A., I lost faith in baseball until I moved to Boston and became an irrational Red Socks fan.

Steve Sillett and Marie Antoine are the principal explorers of the Redwood forest canopy. They're world class athletes, and they also are world class forest ecology scientists.

He climbed up a small tree next to this giant Redwood, and then he leaped through space and grabbed a branch with his hands, and ended up hanging, like catching a bar of a trapeze.

Redwoods grow back into themselves as they expand into space, and this flying buttress is a limb shot out of that small trunk, going back into the main trunk and fusing with it.

It was called Prototaxites.

Nobody knows how old the oldest living Coast Redwoods are because nobody has ever drilled into any of them to count their annual growth rings, and, in any case, the centers of the oldest individuals appear to be hollow.

In recent historic times, about 96 percent of the Coast Redwood forest was cut down, especially in a series of bursts of intense liquidation logging, clear cutting that took place in the 1970s through the early 1990s.

But they made it to the top, and what they found was not a Redwood desert, but a lost world a kind of three dimensional labyrinth in the air, filled with unknown life.

If we had Redwood like biology, if we got a touch of gangrene in our arm then we could just, you know, extract the nutrients extract the nutrients and the moisture out of it until it fell off.

Ants are not known to occur in Redwood trees, curiously enough, and we wondered whether this ant, this species of ant, was only endemic to that one tree, or possibly to that grove.

I like L.A. better.