Strange Trees Discovered
Near Boulder Creek

The foreground tree in the above photograph caused great consternation when the right-of-way reached that point. A photo was sent by one of the lumberjacks to his cousin Wally, an agriculture major at Stanford University. When Wally couldn't identify it, he passed it on to one of his professors.

The photo caused great excitement among Stanford's Dept. of Agriculture, as well as the Biology Dept. since no one had ever seen anything like it. A field trip was quickly mounted, and the SCLCo ran a special to transport the professors to the scene of the discovery. Much "oooh'ing and aaahhh'ing" was heard, but did little to identify the specimen.

Samples were taken and sent off to Washington, which, as it turned out, couldn't identify the tree either. In it's turn, the United States Dept. of Agriculture, along with the FBI, Dept. of the Interior, and Dept. of Defense sent specialists to Santa Cruz to personally inspect the area. Again, the SCLCo was called upon to run a special train to provide transportation. The site of so many "important men" stuffed into one of the rude cars generally used to transport lumberjacks was cause for great amusement among the workmen, and became the subject for crude humor around the lumber camps for weeks on end.

A thorough search of the surrounding area revealed several more of these strange trees growing in isolated groups. Of interest was the fact that they seemed to grow in clusters from a single root, much like the giant redwoods native to the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Further investigation and some excavating around the root area revealed that the strange trees each had a meteorite fragment buried in the ground right under the root, and the strange trees originally grew out of said meteorite. Subsequent analysis of fragments from several of the meteorites determined that they carried the germ of an alien plant life, which was carried through space on fragments of rock probably blown off some other world during an ancient collision or impact. The origin of the rock could not be pinpointed, but it was assumed at the time that they were from beyond our immediate solar system, and were on the order of ten-billion years old. How the plant seeds managed to survive in the cold, radiation-filled vacuum of space is still not understood. The site was immediately classified as "Top Secret" and the government is still researching the strange trees.