If you've driven through the Central California coastline, up highway one, you know, it's a real mood.

Fog rolling over the dramatic cliffs that drop straight into the ocean.

Hairpin turns just inches from the edge, and towering redwood trees that create this sort of dappled

light, a quiet and calm within all of that chaos.

Redwoods are icons of the California coast. There's always been a certain fascination, a sort of

reverence for them. I wanted to know more about them, and when I started looking into the trees,

an interesting phenomenon kept popping up.

In the late 1800s, newspaper articles described this rare version of the tree, a redwood

with white leaves. In photos, they're these small, bushy, pale sprigs set against the brown

trunks of their larger counterparts. It kind of looks like the color had been sucked out of the photo in just that one spot.

These are albino redwoods.

The trees seem to take on a mythical quality, a kind of lock-nest monster of the forest.

Reporters describe them as, quote, freaks of nature. Multiple farmers

claim to have one on their property. And Mendocino County even got into a fight with neighboring

Marin County over which of them owned only a white redwood in the state. At the time, the trees were

seen as a bit of an oddity. And to me, reading these articles, it kind of felt like people wanted to claim this rare

icon, like they were asserting their stake in California, which recently had just been granted

statehood.

Scientists now know that there are more albino trees out there, but exactly how many is

unknown.

And the big error mystery is how a white tree is able to

survive. And why do they even exist at all? I'm Alexa Lim, and this is Atlas Obscira, a celebration of the

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