Ghost Trees
human settlement in United States of America
Ghost Tree is a famed big wave surfing location off the 18th hole of Pebble Beach Golf Links in Pebble Beach, California. The wave breaks off the rock-strewn shoreline known as Pescadero Point. On rare winter days with the proper westerly angle, waves are focused by the deep Carmel Canyon to rear up as much as 60 ft (18 m) in height. Formerly known as Pesky's, Ghost Tree is considered one of the most dangerous waves in the world due to its slab shape, massive boils, strong current, bull kelp, and the underwater labyrinth of natural rock pillars in the impact zone. It is also frequented by white sharks.
Background
Ghost Trees gets its name from the white and gnarly Monterey Cypress trees in the area, which call to mind ghosts.
One of the earliest known surfers of Ghost Trees was Fred Van Dyke, who bodysurfed the wave alone in the early 1960s. In the ensuing decades, a number of locals and visitors to the area paddled out and successfully surfed Ghost Trees, but the consensus was that the wave heaved in too fast and broke too close to the rocks.
In the 2000s, Ghost Trees enjoyed international big wave notoriety as surf professionals and locals accessed the wave by towing into it behind jet skis. During this era of tow-surfing, Carmel surfer Don Curry named the wave Ghost Trees after the bleached trunks of dead cypress at the end of 17-Mile Drive, which passed Pescadero Point.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Ghost Trees” is human settlement in United States of America. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Ghost, Trees and human, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5557204. Authority coordinates are 36.561, -121.952. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ghost Trees” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.