Last year @natgeo photographer Ian Teh and I joined an expedition to the treacherous spot where the Pacific and Atlantic meet, a tiny island in Tierra del Fuego.

We were looking for something no one had ever found: the southernmost tree on Earth. 1/10 https://on.natgeo.com/38AbCCI 

We crossed oceans; chugged 32 hours by ferry; motored 10 hours by wooden boat captained by a sailor who confessed he’d never navigated this wicked stretch. Then we hit Cape Horn + hiked through gales, slipped on penguin guano, and vanished to our necks in prickly shrubs. 2/10

Humans climb the world’s tallest mountain, pilot submarines to the oceans’ deepest trench, explore the planet’s driest deserts. But we’ve never identified the final stands of trees at the top or bottom of the world—at least not correctly. It's really hard! (And windy!) 3/10

Claims to the whereabouts of the south's last forest were, literally, all over the map—and all wrong. But our leader, Brian Buma, did the work. We'd find the final one on Cape Horn, even if we had to climb up or rappel down a rock face above Earth's deadliest seas to do so. 4/10

This wasn't simply about exploration. As climate change warms the Earth, forests are expanding. And the poles (the Arctic + parts of Antarctica) are warming fastest. If Buma found his tree, he'd turn it into a living lab and start tracking how the life around it changed. 5/10

But this place had thwarted Captain Bligh (of Mutiny on the Bounty) and beat back Charles Darwin. So many sailors had died near here that the island hosts a chapel. (Some in our party holed up there as a respite from winds that shredded tents and knocked us off our feet.) 6/10

One day we crawled on our knees into a stubby grove, its canopy no taller than us. Inside was a mat of electric-green mosses and lichens. The trees bent and bowed in spirals like coiled springs, like a world created by J.R.R. Tolkien, compressed from above by a giant hand. 7/10

In a place where winds drive waves into building-sized rollers, the very last tree was never going to be a great oak, a majestic Joshua tree or towering spruce. Nor did it ultimately sprout from a cliff.

To find it, would ended up having to paw through grass. And we did. 8/10

The tree was a Magellan's beech—healthy, 41 yrs old, 10 centimeters in diameter.

It rose a meter high, then bent sideways against the wind and grew a dozen ft along the ground.

Read more abt our grueling @natgeo hunt for Earth's southernmost tree https://on.natgeo.com/38AbCCI  9/10

And please take a listen to the embarrassingly accurate behind-the-scenes account of our foible-rich effort to find the world's southernmost tree on @natgeo's terrific podcast, "Overheard." 10/10 https://open.spotify.com/episode/4CDitf0iOuQh6XfrmfMBsX?si=UL_ZIhd3Rsue9WBEuZ9aNQ