The Ancient Live Oak Miracle, Robed In Light -- Friendlymoose Photo Contest

There is no panorama possible on a mere TC111 Android cell phone to express to you how immense and miraculous this old survivor is in San Francisco, California ... the sun was in my face on April 9, so literally I needed the edge of its shade to even capture it, and there was no way to get behind it ... Lone Mountain's lower northern flank right there is still too steep for that. This view had my ankles telling me: "Not one step further up -- and you have the AUDACITY to be turning 270 degrees for a panorama HERE?"

I had the audacity, and I will tell you why ... look to the right, and you see stumps even thicker -- perhaps a parent, there, finding its long grave giving nutrients back to its child -- but even that is not enough to understand this remarkable individual tree, in one of San Francisco's very last stands of live oaks, south of which the bulk of Golden Gate Park rolls down to the bottom of Lone Mountain to the edge of one of the other last stands between Buena Vista Hill and Mt. Sutro ...

How old is this tree? You are supposed to measure live oaks at chest height, work out its circumference and divide by pi, then multiply the result by four. We're going to pretend pi is 3 to start to see the math ... so, his particular live oak had foliage spread down to the ground where I was, so, adjust for me being on a hill and even for me being short, chest height still gives us at least 30 feet around, or 360 inches. Divide by 3 and that gives you 120, but we know pi is closer to 3.14, and without wearying you with details, let's just put that number at around 103. Multiply that by 4, and you get a tree well over 400 years old, with the remains of still older, thicker trees still around it.

400 years ago puts us in 1625, meaning this tree's parents might have witnessed the care of the five Native tribes of San Francisco then (Yelemu, by an old Native name) end, and the Spaniards succeed the Natives. Live oak would have been much wanted for shipbuilding by the Spaniards, the Mexicans who succeeded them, and the Californios who eventually would come into the United States, to say nothing of such trees being wanted for firewood ... but then came the people in the 1870s and 1880s who realized the sandy hills and sand dunes trapped between them were going to make it impossible to settle the western part of the city unless the dunes and the hills were stabilized. This was the cause of there being a Golden Gate Park!

Lone Mountain, being the highest and last hill on a little ridge that ends there, did not need as much stabilization because of its oak stands at this spot, and so they were chosen to be the northern and southern borders of the park, but then one has to consider this tree survived the 1906 earthquake -- not hard for a tree, but again, the need for firewood by so many displaced people would have been immense, for Golden Gate Park's wood was not yet grown up.

But, running parallel literally to that: Stanyan and Fulton Streets, not even a mile away to the east and north and all the development of the city itself -- had this tree been a mile eastward or northward, it would not have survived even to be in the earthquake.

I found this tree by happenstance. I turned and went up a sandy trail off the beaten park path, going up the hill, and found at the end of the trail -- literally as high up as anyone can safely walk -- this immense live oak, dazzling in the light, the light that was streaming also through the fresh spring grass, in a scene much as it would have looked a hundred years ago in early spring, and even two hundred years ago.

Barely a mile from the noise and busyness of the city, I had walked through time and space to see a witness of San Francisco becoming what it is today ... sitting there unbothered, a kind of miracle, and looking every inch of that fact in the light. It is the greatest find of the two years since I discovered the remaining Oak Woodlands that border Golden Gate Park -- an ancient miracle, robed in light.