Extract from the Diary's Introductory Essay
by internationally bestselling author Richard Preston

Artemis Creek does not appear on any map. It is two feet wide and as clear as air. It trickles down a mountain slope in a rainforest on the coast of northern California, somewhere in a valley just out of sight of the sea. The creek runs over a mosaic of pebbles and drops into a cave, where it disappears underground.

I am lying on my stomach under a spray of ferns, with my head inside the mouth of Artemis Cave. The cave seems to be about thirty feet across, and it consists of a labyrinth of twisty passages, mostly underwater and too small to admit a person. Artemis Cave has a lemony scent. It smells alive.

"It's time to get ready." Marie Antoine's voice comes from above.

I pull my head out of the cave.

Marie Antoine is sitting cross-legged on top of a huge redwood log on the hillside above me-a young woman, twenty seven years old, a botanist, with green eyes, a narrow chin, delicate features, short brown hair and slender hands. She puts on a helmet. Her breath smokes in the damp winter air: the valley is a temperate rainforest, cool yet almost never touched by snow.

I step backward, my boots splashing in the water of the creek, and I look up. The trunk of Artemis Tree, a gigantic coast redwood, is a furrowed wall of wood rising straight out of the creek. Artemis is thirty stories tall. The wall-the tree's lower trunk-begins at the mouth of Artemis Cave. The cave is inside the tree, and the creek pours into the tree. The trunk of Artemis slants upward along a basal swell, and the trunk goes vertical and soars. Far overhead, huge secondary trunks angle out of the main trunk and muscle into a dark crown. The top of the tree is nowhere to be seen. Artemis is one of the biggest living things on the planet, and is about two thousand years old.

The tree was discovered in the spring of 2002 and was named for the Greek goddess Artemis, the virgin sister of Apollo, who hunted deer with a bow and arrows. No one had noticed it previously. Giant coast redwood trees (Sequoia sempervirens) seem to distort space and time around them. They cloak themselves in clouds of their own foliage, and they confuse the human mind, which has trouble seeing a great tree in its wondrous totality as a living thing.

A radio crackles. "Marie, we're at a hundred and fifty feet. Both ropes are free. You can start up when you want." It's the voice of her husband, Stephen Sillett, a botanist and forest canopy scientist. He's mapping the crown of Artemis along with another botanist named Robert Van Pelt-the tree is not yet fully explored or understood.

Marie Antoine takes up her radio. "It will be about five minutes before we start climbing."

I open my backpack, take out my harness, which is called a tree climbing saddle, and step into it. I touch the objects hanging from the saddle-ascenders, safety strap, descender, radio, spare descender, carabiners-in a flight check for the ascent into the redwood forest canopy.

Artemis thrusts into an infinity of green and sky, milky blue and mutable with running clouds. The tree is surrounded by a debris ring-a circular rampart of broken branches and lumps of rotting limbs piled up around its base-which is eight feet high. Giant redwoods hold tons of dead wood in their crowns, and as this falls it builds up around the tree. Once every half a thousand years or so, a redwood may drop an entire section of itself: a cluster of trunks splits off with a roar that can be heard for miles, in an event known as redwood calving.

Two strands of black rope hang down along opposite sides of the trunk. I get myself up the debris ring, clamp my ascenders to one of the ropes, and hang there in my saddle, swinging back and forth, while Marie Antoine clamps her ascenders to the other rope. We begin climbing up opposite sides of Artemis, two humans moving upward into the redwood forest canopy which is one of the last unexplored regions of the Earth...

Return to Calendar and Engagement Diary 2006