Since my July adventure with Mike Fay in the redwoods, I had been longing to be out amongst those giant trees again.

Biologist and expert tree-rigger Jim Spickler eases the camera back out of the canopy

There is just something magical about those ancient forests that had a lock on my ever wandering mind. So you can imagine my excitement when John Rubin Productions once again phoned me to work on the redwoods show they are producing for National Geographic Explorer. This time around I’d be assisting my good friend Andy Shillabeer on a shoot focused on the work of some dedicated canopy researchers.

Given that the Coastal Redwood is the tallest tree on the planet, you can imagine that working in the canopy isn’t exactly easy. The lowest branches of a redwood might not appear until they are over a hundred feet in the air, so how do they study them? They climb.

Steve Sillett climbs to the top of a newly discovered redwood giant in order to measure its full height.

Steve Sillett and his fellow researchers might be the most physically fit botanists in the world, and it has paid off. Their love for climbing and science has opened up a whole new understanding of an ecosystem that had for a long time literally remained out of reach of science. The immense size of redwoods coupled with the fact that they can live for millenia, means all types of organic matter are deposited high up on the branches, and eventually there is enough soil that plants and all kinds of other organisms spend their entire lives up in the canopy, just as though it was a piece of the forest floor. Anyway, I could geek out talking about this stuff forever, but I’ll leave some of that for the show. Afterall, the only thing more exciting for someone like me, is the question of how do you film this? Luckily, they were way ahead of me on this. Andy had done the redwoods portion of the Planet Earth series, putting to use a system known as a cable dolly that enables you to balance a camera while sending it flying along ropes, producing breathtaking cinematic moves. Since then he’s built his own cable dolly with some improvements on the system the BBC has been using. Putting the new system to work for the first time meant a lot of long, hard days as we ironed out the kinks. As you can imagine, getting all that gear out into some really rugged parts of the forest was not easy, but the results were absolutely breathtaking. Being able to move the camera hundreds of feet vertically, diagonally or horizontally gave our shots the feel of a helicopter flying right through the forest. Andy would control the pan & tilt of the camera wirelessly, while I controlled the focus, zoom and iris. Then by stablizing the system, we were able to get locked off shots, even conduct interviews 300 feet in the air. Like I said, breathtaking. The only downside… having to wait to see the show in all of is high def glory until it airs in October 2009. If your interested in learning more about the cable dolly system, check out their site www.spider-cine.com. If you are more psyched about the trees than camera rigs, pick up the NY Times bestseller, The Wild Trees by Richard Preston. Its an incredible modern day exploration story, that chronicles the work of Sillett and others in their quest to discover and measure the tallest tree on earth. -skip