02/13/2026
In August 1996, Julia Butterfly Hill was the designated driver for a friend when a drunk driver rear-ended them. The impact was so violent that the steering wheel pierced her skull. She suffered a traumatic brain injury. Her short-term memory was shattered. She struggled to speak and to walk.
It took nearly ten months of intense physical and cognitive therapy before she could function again.
During that long, slow recovery, something inside her shifted. She had graduated high school at sixteen and had been working nonstop ever since, first as a waitress, then as a restaurant manager. Career. Money. Material things. The crash broke that trance. “The steering wheel in my head,” she later said, “both figuratively and literally, steered me in a new direction in my life.”
When she was finally released by her doctors, she took a road trip to California. At a reggae fundraiser in Northern California to help protect the redwood forests, she learned something devastating. Only a tiny fraction of the ancient old-growth redwood ecosystem still remained. She saw photographs of clear-cut logging sites that looked like bomb craters, entire hillsides stripped bare.
Then she stepped into the forest herself.
“When I entered the majestic cathedral of the redwood forest for the first time,” she wrote, “I dropped to my knees and began to cry.”
Activists from Earth First! had been rotating volunteers in and out of threatened trees on land owned by Pacific Lumber Company, trying to prevent them from being cut down. They needed someone to sit in a particular thousand-year-old redwood on a windswept ridge above the small community of Stafford. On New Year’s Eve the year before, a massive mudslide linked to logging on the slopes above had buried homes in mud and debris.
No one else volunteered.
Julia said yes.
On December 10, 1997, at twenty-three, she climbed 180 feet into the ancient tree. The moon was rising as she reached the top, so the activists named the tree Luna.
She thought she would stay a few weeks. Maybe a month.
Two weeks became two years.
Julia lived on a small platform high in the canopy. She had a single-burner propane stove, a sleeping bag, tarps for shelter, and a solar-powered phone. Volunteers hiked supplies along a long trail and hoisted them up by rope.
The first winter was one of the harshest in memory. El Niño storms brought fierce winds and freezing rain. “Imagine you’re on a bucking bronco,” Julia wrote. “Put that bronco on a ship at sea, in the middle of a storm. Then put that 180 feet in the air.” She clung to Luna’s trunk and prayed. She was certain she might die.
Pacific Lumber did not wait for the weather to force her down. Helicopters flew low over her platform, trying to tear away her tarps. Security guards surrounded the base of Luna for days, attempting to cut off supplies. Loggers shouted threats from below. She received death threats by phone.
Julia did not come down.
On December 18, 1999, 738 days after she first climbed into Luna, Julia Hill’s feet finally touched the ground.
Pacific Lumber agreed to preserve Luna and trees within a buffer zone around her. In exchange, $50,000 raised by activists went to the company, which donated the funds to Humboldt State University for forestry research.
About a year later, someone attacked Luna with a chainsaw, cutting deep into nearly half her trunk. A team of arborists, biologists, and engineers came together to save the tree. Even Pacific Lumber employees helped fabricate the steel supports used to stabilize her. The wound was packed with clay, and cables were anchored to neighboring trees.
Luna still stands today. Caretakers check her regularly, maintaining the supports and watching her crown. Biologists say she could live for centuries more.
Julia went on to write a bestselling book called The Legacy of Luna and co-founded the Circle of Life Foundation. Red Hot Chili Peppers nodded to her in their song Can't Stop. The Simpsons created an episode inspired by her story. A Broadway musical, Redwood, drew from her life.
But Julia says the most important lesson had nothing to do with politics or protest. It was about what happens inside you when you stand for something.
“When I got to the top of Luna for the first time,” she later admitted, “the first words out of my mouth were, ‘Wow, what I could do with a good rocket launcher from here.’ That kind of anger is a candle burning at both ends. It consumes us and doesn’t really change anyone but ourselves.”
She did not stay 738 days because of rage.
She stayed because of love. For the tree. For the forest. For something worth protecting.
“The question is not, ‘How can I, one person, make a difference?’” Julia said. “The question is, ‘What kind of difference do I want to make?’”
