It's 1852 in the forests of Northern California. A long-haired big-game hunter named Augustus T.

Dowd is stumbling through the trees. He's tracking a wounded grizzly bear, following a trail of

bloody prints. Crashing through the brush, Dowd stumbles on something that stops him in his tracks.

It's a grove, a cluster of trees. But these trees are unlike any that Dowd has ever seen.

They're giants. They tower hundreds and hundreds of feet into the air. It would take 10 men with

arms spread wide to encircle one of the trucks. And then Dowd sees the biggest tree of them all.

30 feet wide and 300 feet tall.

I'm Amanda McGowan and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange,

incredible and wondrous places. Today we'll learn about the life and death of the largest tree

in this grove, known as the Discovery Tree. It's journey from tourist attraction to sparking

a conservation movement after this.

In 2014, 160 years after the big-game hunter Augustus T. Dowd stumbled on a grove of giant trees,

artist Josh Winkler arrived at the very same grove. The Calaveras big tree grove in Arnold,

I just brought a bunch of different papers and I brought a bunch of different types of graphite

from just soft graphite pencils to chunks of graphite. Josh was looking for the biggest tree in

the grove, the one that had so fascinated Augustus T. Dowd, the Discovery Tree, as it came to be known.

The Discovery Tree is a giant Sequoia, a kind of enormous ancient tree species that's found

naturally only in California. Like its cousin, the coastal redwood, giant Sequoias can grow to

hundreds of feet high and live for over a thousand years. Sequoias are a little bit shorter and

statter than redwoods, they have thicker trunks. But really just the scale and size of these things

is hard to convey. You just can't believe it. Like the age, the immensity, the fact that the trees

seem like they're from a different time that doesn't exist anymore. I mean, you picture a time

...