If you didn’t know any better, you might look out over the forested valley at the edge of the Oakland hills and fail to notice Old Survivor among its fellow redwoods. It’s a bit taller than the others, though, and certainly scragglier. The branches at its crown are cartoonishly crooked; up close, its trunk is covered in burls. This is partially what saved its life.
Old Survivor is the name given to the last remaining old-growth redwood tree in Oakland, a nearly 500-year-old wonder that overlooks the East Bay from the top of Leona Heights Park. Old growth redwoods are mature trees that are typically centuries old — the oldest known coast redwood has been around for over 2,000 years.
In the 19th century, when Oakland was still known for gargantuan redwoods that were being razed to build a burgeoning San Francisco, Old Survivor was somehow left untouched.
According to Deborah Zierten, senior manager of education at Save the Redwoods League, the tree’s location probably played a role in its survival. Old Survivor grows out of a boulder on the edge of a steep slope, and harvesting its massive trunk and schlepping it down the hills would have presented a challenge to loggers, who used teams of oxen to drag felled trees to flatter land. Old Survivor’s longevity, Zierten said, can also be credited to its less-than-perfect appearance…