Here is a puzzle. Well maybe not so much a puzzle as a curiosity.

While vacationing in upper Michigan last week I walked six qnat-infested miles through the beech and fir northern woodlands to the sandy shores of Lake Superior to see this sight...

http://community.webshots.com/s/image1/4/3/38/95140338pgQRTn_fs.jpg

Standing forty-five feet tall above the shoreline of Lake Superior is Chapel Rock - a detached piece of resistant sandstone of a very aesthetically pleasing shape, and color, and size. Yet the circumstance of a single forty foot dark green fir tree growing incongruously from the stone flat at the top of the rock made for a symmetrical beauty too lofty for low-life modern men like me and might be best left for the delicate sensitivities of dead Indian gods.

Never-the-less we low-life men are a nosey sort, and like dull-witted engineers we make ourselves pedestrian by asking dull-witted questions like...

Seeing that the soil cover on Chapel Rock was only about an inch or so deep we are not surprised to see a ten inch in diameter root from the fir tree reach over a horizontal span of twenty feet of empty space to reach a larger soil covered rock at exactly the same elevation near-by.

Question: Most trees don't have eyes, so how did that tree know where the soil and water was?