Hurricanes Rita and Ike chaotically dethroned some of Texas’ reigning forest giants - much to the angst of Smith, who spent past weeks trudging East Texas pine forests seeking the Leviathan Loblolly conifers whose waist, height and crown dimensions measured up to a prestigious listing on the Texas Big Tree Registry.

“We confirmed that four state champs were dead from those storms, another two are highly likely casualties because we could not find them and they were in an area of extreme blow down,” Smith lamented.

The Texas Forest Service has been measuring and documenting the state’s loftiest lumber since the 1940s, after American Forest started its registry. The forest service coordinates the big tree program to locate and recognize the largest known species of its kind that grows in Texas; to obtain the cooperation of tree owners to protect and preserve those specimens as landmarks for future generations to enjoy; and to stimulate interest in and a greater appreciation of trees, their worth as a natural resource and as individual specimens. The Big Tree Registry lists 300-plus native and naturalized species, all of which can claim a reigning monarch.

“I really like champion trees,” Smith said. “I really like seeing them and writing stories about them. I think the public has a real love for trees and certainly the landowners really have a great love for everything big. “

Smith’s exuberance is unequivocal when he crows about 72 Texas trees making the 2008-09 edition of American Forest’s National Register of Big Trees, which selected 22 new entries from the Lone Star State.

Texas now ranks fourth in the nation - behind Arizona, 94; Florida, 86; and California, 82 - for having the most big trees making American Forest’s list of Goliath timber.

A short-leaf pine in Smith County, for example, measured 91 feet tall, with a trunk diameter of 151 feet.

There is definitely a “Folks, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet” attitude that prevails in Smith’s third-floor office in the John B. Connally Building in College Station. In Texas, where traditionally everything is bigger and better, Smith has found what could be dubbed the next reigning champ in its division - a lofty Loblolly pine in southern Rusk County that towers a whopping 130 feet tall from roots to crown.

A 1985 Penn State graduate specializing in forest science, Smith logged several years in the lumber business on the East Coast followed by The Society of American Foresters internship in Washington, D.C. before getting a “real” job with the Texas Forest Service.

Smith’s 20-year state forest service tenure includes a decade as the individual responsible for weeding through nominees and choosing champs.

“In that role, I currently oversee several statewide programs for urban forestry, but also manage the Texas Big Trees Registry and the Famous Trees of Texas Web Site.”

“The job is bigger than you think,” Smith quipped. “Like I tell people about trees, it’s bigger than you think. Stand next to it and feel how big it is.”

The Big Trees of Texas Web Site explains how to measure a tree, has a user friendly nomination form, a list of the state’s 336 reigning trees, which ranges from the biggest yucca in Pecos County, to the national champion cottonwood - which measures just under 10 feet in diameter around the trunk-in Fort Davis. The closest champs in Central Texas reside in Travis and Lee Counties.

Nominations from Bell County occurred in 1983 and 1999 for a cedar and Texas Buckeye. Neither made the list. Nevertheless, for all the disappointments from a tree-loving public, the agency continues to average 50 nominations a year statewide.

Milam County doesn’t yet have any big trees to make the list, but Paul Unger, president of the newly organized El Camino Real Master Naturalist Chapter believes the group’s planned Big Tree hunt to be launched in February, will put some of Milam County’s finest specimens on the state registry. The group plans to compile a book cataloging a Milam County’s plant, animal, insect and fish species, including big and historical trees, Unger said.

Shelli Turner, Rockdale City secretary, believes that Milam County city may have an undiscovered champ: a huge tree at the new Sumuel Park in east Rockdale.

Smith travels statewide to check out tree nominees - a process that begins with a formal application submitted, that asks for measurements, location and a photo.

Recently, “we have had a flurry of nominations, some which will result in new champions,” Smith said. “One of the latest nominees is an eastern cottonwood in Falls County near Bremond.”

Smith uses a tape measure to find the trunk girth, but for height, he produces “some fancy forestry tools” such as a laser rangefinder, that plays a beam from the base to top to provide numbers that are tabulated with trigonometry to yield height.”

This “neat little gizmo” saves Smith and his staff the effort of having to climb a towering tree.

As a general rule, the Methuselahs of Texas timber will be the biggest, Smith said.

“It definitely takes years to get that kind of girth that is going to make a champion,” Smith said.

Unfortunately, with Texas’ utilitarian past as an agricultural stronghold, many trees have not survived the development of farm and ranchland, and East Texas loggers.

“In the past a lot of the land was cleared to make room for crops and cows, and it’s only in the past 100 years that some of the forests have re-grown,” Smith said.

However, when trees marked property boundaries, they survived, hence, the discovery recently of a giant Loblolly pine in Rusk County.

“If you look at a lot of old property deeds, you find those old witness trees; a lot of them may have been left for that reason, and so they still had utilitarian purpose in our agricultural past so they were just left there and were not cut down.”

How old are the oldest?

“I think some of the trees that are state and national champs could be in the 200 to maybe 500 years old for the oldest bald cypress tree. I would not rule out older than that, but I have a hard time seeing more than 500 years old in Texas. It’s possible, but I am not going to cut it down to find out.”