One tree, forty-seven thousand trunks

In Utah’s Fishlake National Forest there’s an aspen grove covering 106 acres. Walk into it and you’ll pass tens of thousands of white trunks.

It is one tree. Roughly 47,000 trunks, one root system, every one of them genetically identical—a single organism the size of a neighborhood, pretending to be a forest.

Its name is Pando. Latin for I spread out.

If a forest can be one tree, what else are we miscounting?

Sources

• Fishlake National Forest, the Pando Clone — US Forest Service

Sources checked 2026-08-12.