Climbing high to the sky Maine’s tall trees are among the biggest in the nation

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It’s a perfect day for tree hunting. Dried leaves skitter across the road like crabs, and every turn reveals fireworks of red, orange and yellow foliage against the Indian summer sky.

As the road twists farther into the countryside, trees start to grow taller, up over the roofs of farmhouses and white church steeples. A grove of white pines, tall and straight and regal, soar above the rest.

But just beyond Morrill’s downtown, Maine’s champion white pine makes them look fragile.

This tree, possibly the largest Eastern white pine in the nation, rises at least 125 feet up, so tall that you have to lie on your back to see the tiptop. Three hundred years ago, Maine’s legendary ship builders could have had an entire two-masted schooner out of this tree.

Today, it’s a tourist attraction.

The forked white pine on Elsie Bowen’s lawn is among the most popular champions on the Maine Forest Service’s list of big trees. Every summer, cars pull to the side of the road to gawk at the behemoth growing just a few feet from the pavement, she said.

Now, the tree is a contender for a national title. With a total score of 381, Bowen’s tree should easily beat the current champion, a 363-pointer in Michigan’s Porcupine Mountain Wilderness State Park.

Bowen’s family nominated the tree out of curiosity 20 years ago. The pine had always been a giant, she said.

“It seemed just as big when I was a kid as it does now,” said the octogenarian, who lives in the same Morrill farmhouse where she grew up.

Bowen recalls hearing a yell while sitting on the lawn one summer afternoon, and looking up to see a neighbor boy atop the big pine.

“He said he could see Cadillac Mountain from there,” she said. “I don’t know how he climbed it. It must have been like those rock climbers – you just dig your toes in.”

Bowen doesn’t know her tree’s age, only that it was a monster decades ago when her grandparents dubbed this part of their farm “the pinery.”

For all its fame, the champion white pine isn’t what you’d call beautiful. It started as a single tree, then split into massive conjoined twins, with crowns that must be 30 feet apart. Limbs that should be graceful instead make torturous twists and turns. On one branch, a vertical sprout that’s a huge pine in its own right shoots straight up toward the sun.

And the pine bears scars of its long battle for supremacy, with dead limbs and jagged stumps protruding from its double trunks.

“The ice storm did a tremendous amount of damage,” Bowen said. “I spent days and days picking up branches.

But enough of its 72-foot-wide crown remains to earn the tree its national recognition. The big tree register isn’t necessarily the tallest or the widest trees; rather, it assigns points based on a formula that considers a tree’s height, its trunk circumference, and the spread of its crown.

Officials from American Forests, the group that has kept the national registry since 1940, came out to Morrill in July to make measurements of Bowen’s pine.

But experienced tree hunters can spot a winner, said Mike DeBonis, who oversees the state list for the Maine Forest Service.

This year, Maine has 157 species on its list and the majority were nominated by a handful of tree hunters.

“You look at a tree and say, ‘I bet I could find one bigger than that,'” DeBonis said. “If you start looking, it’s addictive.”

Some people use their annual vacation to tree-hunt, others use the list as a guide and become tree tourists.

Tim Lindsay has been hunting champion trees since he realized that a beautiful Bar Harbor specimen had been listed by an out-of-stater.

“I said, ‘That just isn’t right,'” he said.

In the past four years, Lindsay has listed more than 40 trees, and he has another nine nominations waiting in the wings.

“I’m amazed by the diversity of God’s creation of trees,” he said. “It’s challenging. You realize that there’s more you don’t know than you do know.”

In Deer Isle, everyone knows the location of a famously massive yellow birch that for years was Maine’s only national champion tree. But the property’s owners declined to be a part of this story for fear of tree paparazzi invading their yard.

In Belfast, where the state’s champion copper beech dwarfs a downtown inn and shades two streets, businesspeople thought nothing of a strange woman wandering into their shops in search of directions to “the tree.”

That sense of community pride is the beauty of the registry, DeBonis said.

Big trees capture everyone’s imagination, and that leads to a greater awareness about Maine’s forests, he said.

“The big trees just fascinate folks,” DeBonis said.

The Maine Forest Service is currently accepting nominations to its 2005 Register of Big Trees. For more information or to view the list, visit the Project Canopy Web site at www.projectcanopy.org or call DeBonis at (800) 367-0223.