The Moved Giant Sequoia of Fort Boise Park

In June 2017 a hospital paid around $300,000 to move a tree a quarter of a mile. The tree was this giant sequoia, ten storeys of it by the local reckoning, lifted with its roots intact and walked through Boise on a Saturday night from the garden where it had stood since about 1912 to Fort Boise Park. St. Luke's Medical Center wanted a new tower on the old spot and did not want to be the people who cut the sequoia down. It had been planted beside the home of Drs. Fred and Alice Pittenger. Family history holds that the seedling material came from California by way of the naturalist John Muir, which has been repeated for a century and rests on the family's own telling rather than on any document. Take it as the story the tree arrived with. The University of Idaho's champion register measured it at its old address: 224 inches around, 569 centimetres, 70 inches through the trunk, 89 feet tall. It is the largest known giant sequoia in the state. Moving a sequoia at a hundred years old is a gamble. The arborists on the job put its remaining span at another three to five centuries if the roots took hold. Nine years on it is standing in a public park where anybody can walk up to it, which was the entire point of the exercise.