The tallest trees in the Adirondacks are white pines.
The tallest white pine in the modern Adirondacks measures in at just over 160 feet. It’s also the tallest tree in New York, and neighbor to four others each taller than the Statue of Liberty from her base to torch. White pines, sometimes soloing high above their neighbor trees, are prone to lightning strikes and snapping off in gales, and when that happens, they turn into towering trunks called snags teaming with life that burrows into their softening wood.
Wild Walk’s snag is a giant among the giants, big enough for a stairwell inside, and four stories tall. It let’s you imagine how massive the snags are to smaller creatures who flock to them for shelter. Think of all the places you could live in the forest, and then imagine a hole high up on a sheer wall of wood, dry, warmed by the sun, safe from the meat-eating heavyweights and their big appetites. Snags are home to more life in their own afterlives than when the sap still pumps up their towering stems.