The OverstoryFall 2026

“I just hope this article isn’t going to make people want to come climb these,” Jimmy Swingle said as we stood at the base of three 130- to 140-foot giant sequoias on the Memorial Union Quad. Branches rustled above us. Little cones sprinkled down, followed by drifting flecks of bark.

Campus police hadn’t noticed when Swingle used a crossbow to launch climbing lines into the trees the day before. But now our heaps of equipment and orange shirts were hard to ignore. An officer had already stopped by to make sure our operation was legit, somewhat reluctantly accepting that it appeared to be.

“Don’t worry,” I told Swingle. “It’s alumni who read the magazine, not so much students. They know better than to climb a humongous tree without ropes and guides.”

“Alumni,” he said with a skeptical laugh. “You mean like Eric and me?”

We couldn’t see Eric Forsman, ’72, M.S. ’76, Ph.D. ’80, sitting high in one of the swaying sequoias, offering encouragement as our writer steadily made her way up a trunk. Forsman and Swingle, M.S. ’05 — a retired U.S. Forest Service scientist and a current one — teach a tree-climbing class for students who want to study life in the canopy, and for anyone else curious enough to try.

And as is so often the case at OSU, both have résumés that make “tree-climbing instructor” an amusingly incomplete description. For starters, Forsman’s graduate research showed that spotted owls depend on old-growth forest, helping launch one of the fiercest environmental battles in U.S. history.

On this summer morning, however, their task was to help us learn whether students had hidden anything high in the MU overstory.

Katherine Cusumano, MFA ’24, was seeking the answer for her cover feature about OSU’s newly accredited campus arboretum (see page 32). For the Spring 2025 Stater, she descended into dark, cramped steam tunnels to explore the world below the Corvallis campus. Now we were eager to find out whether students had made a mark far above it, too.

Once the drone following the climbers’ progress had risen high enough, we spotted some evidence. You can just make it out on this issue’s cover.

Artifacts at 130 feet might be a bit unusual, but the impulse behind them is not. Every generation of students makes its campus its own, leaving mementos and forging memories in buildings and — as seems particularly fitting here in Oregon — the green spaces between.

Maybe it’s the elms gone gold along an old familiar bike ride or an engagement beside the Trysting Tree. For former student Stacy Allison — the first U.S. woman to climb Mt. Everest — it was the Douglas-fir she scaled when she first started to dream about climbing mountains.

Have any campus trees earned a special place in your memories of OSU? Drop us a note to let us know.

And for the record: We are not encouraging anyone to climb the sequoias. But we may have just reminded a few alumni that they already did.