Battling A Giant Killer, Science, 21 Aug 2015, vol. 349, issue 6250

‘On a frigid morning this past March, arborist Will Blozan snuck behind a small church here and headed down into a gorge thick with rhododendron.
He crashed through the shrubs until he spotted the gorge’s treasure: the world’s largest known living eastern hemlock tree, known as the Cheoah.
In 2006, Blozan had climbed the nearly 50-meter-tall giant and calculated that it contained 44.29 cubic meters of wood—then a record. Blozan would later discover two even larger hemlocks in the nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Both of those champions, however, are now dead.’ –Story continued here: Science-2015-Popkin-802-5