A Tree Made Of Metal ??

Try as they might, it is hard to hide a camouflage a cell tower. For one thing, the towers are way bigger than the trees they’re meant to look like.

Hey all! As we pointed out earlier this week,?Lesser Tedium is finishing up its run?next week. (We’ll be leaning on?Tedium?once again.) I will still have issues into next week; stay subscribed, because something will take its place.

Cell towers are a necessary evil?when it comes to the modern world. They give us access to communication resources that we might not otherwise have, which definitely beats the alternative of landlines.

The problem is, they’re ugly, and people hate seeing them. These are the very types of things the term “not in my backyard” was invented for. They create conspiracy theories and misconceptions that are often hard to shake.

So, what’s a mobile phone provider to do? One of the most interesting strategies they’ve used is to dress up cell phones as objects that at least?kind?of look like they make sense in the environment, whether as clock towers, water towers, or fake windmills.

The most famous example, though, is the cell tower that is designed to look like a tree. If you’ve ever drove down the interstate in a relatively lightly populated stretch of highway, you have likely seen these. Usually around a crop of actual trees, there is one that is usually significantly taller than the rest, obnoxiously so, with a particularly thick tree trunk.

Unless you have been fooled to think otherwise, it is easy to determine that this is a cell tower. It is covered in artificial branches just to look reasonably convincing, but I should warn you that it is usually not. It is far from convincing because it is so much bigger than the rest of the forest.

As?99% Invisible?has noted, these camouflaged towers exist essentially to appease local regulators, who can’t block towers outright thanks to the Communications Act of 1996, but can put in regulations to ensure they look somewhat less visible. It is far from perfect, because of seasonal factors and their overwhelming height—which means that hiding the equipment in a water tower or church often makes more sense.

But that’s not’s true everywhere. And that’s why we have trees full of antennas lining the landscape.

? Wanna learn more??Beyond the?99% Invisible?piece we mentioned, check out our 2015 piece on cell towers, “Fake Metal Trees.”