Editor's Note: Preserving a redwood mystery

Somehow, though, it seems more appropriate to leave the subject shrouded in a little of the mysterious fog that pervades and nurtures the redwoods of the North Coast. After all, the folks who research this kind of thing aren’t even sure if they’ve found the tallest of the tallest trees in the world, so what’s wrong with leaving a little wonder in the location of the Wonder Stump?

Besides, like all of us, the Wonder Stump ain’t what it used to be. “It’s about half the size it was,” said one caller.

Mary Jean Goecker’s family moved to the area in 1937. “We were few and far between” back then, she said, but the Wonder Stump didn’t escape her parents’ attention. Sometime in the 1940s they photographed it. Back then you couldn’t miss it, because the tiny black and white picture shows it framed behind a large sign reading “Wonder Stump Road.”

The sign is long gone, and the stump itself “apparently caught fire in the ’70s,” Heyer said. Its remains rest a little over a mile up from Elk Valley Cross Road on property owned by a family that is reportedly gracious when “people stop by to see it,” Heyer said.

All the conjecture in the last week prompted longtime residents Frank and Patty McNamara to drive up and down Wonder Stump Road looking for the site. Patty said Frank “grew up here and knows every trail there is.” Or at least he used to. He could recall getting to the Wonder Stump as a child by walking past “Louie’s old broken down house,” Patty said.

Then she opened a new-old curiosity by mentioning the “Never-Dying Redwood,” which after falling became the base from which an extraordinary assortment of new growth sprouted. When she was growing up, “I got so tired of my family taking people out there to see it,”  she said, adding it was “in plain sight” where Elk Valley Cross Road and Highway 101 intersect.

Plain sight? Sounds too easy.