Parson Jones Tree

The tallest tree here is also the closest to the car park, about a hundred yards in on flat ground. The Parson Jones Tree runs over 310 feet, some 94.5 metres, which makes it taller than Colonel Armstrong, the older and more visited of the two. That height comes from survey work in the 1970s and does not appear to have been redone, so the number is half a century old; a redwood of this age adds height slowly, which makes the figure more likely stale than wrong. Age estimates land near 1,300 years, in a band from about 1,100 to 1,500, none of it from a ring count. What the height means on the ground is a trunk that leaves your field of view and carries on. There is no point from which the top and the base are visible at once, which is why photographs of it are uniformly disappointing and why people end up standing there longer than they meant to. Same entrance and same ten dollar vehicle fee as Colonel Armstrong, which is five minutes further along the same flat loop. The pair takes well under an hour. This is the one visitors underestimate, because a tree that close to the road is assumed to be the warm-up rather than the tallest thing in the reserve.