A walk through Muir Woods, a place where there are giant trees over 1,000 years old

Northwest of San Francisco, California, and near the Pacific coast, there is an impressive forest with enormous trees.

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This forest is just 12 kilometers from the Golden Gate Bridge. It covers 224 hectares and is characterized by giant sequoia trees (some over 100 meters tall) that cover 97 hectares of this national monument, established in 1908. This is a very old forest, which began to form 13,000 years ago, around the time the first Native Americans arrived in the region.

The official website for this national monument notes that two groves within Muir Woods, called "Bohemian" and "Cathedral," contain the largest and oldest trees in Muir Woods National Monument: "Some redwoods are at least 1,000 years old. Most of the mature trees are between 500 and 800 years old."

To give you an idea, the Crusades hadn't even ended when those trees sprouted and Columbus was still hundreds of years away from discovering America. That's nothing compared to the oldest tree in the United States, known as the Methuselah, is over 4,800 years old. It's located in California's White Mountains, in the interior of the state, and is older than the great pyramids of Egypt.

A few weeks ago, Ambient Exploration published a two-hour video of a silent walk through Muir Woods, a video that makes you realize how small and ephemeral we humans are:

You can see some screenshots from this video here, which, frankly, left me speechless...

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Main image: Ambient Exploration.