Location Taken: Washington state
Time Taken: June 2008
Sometimes it’s really tough to take pictures of really small things. Other times, it’s the big things that get you.
This is a big thing.
Not that you can easily tell. There’s not much in this photo to provide scale. That hole could easily be a few inches tall, or it could be four or five feet tall. It was the latter.
I wouldn’t have been able to fit through it, but someone a bit shorter and a lot skinnier could have done so easily.
If I remember right, this was one of the three giant trees we visited when traveling along the ocean edge of the Olympic peninsula in Washington. All of them were spur-of-the-moment visits. Signs saying “Giant tree, next right” are almost as irresistible for my mom as signs saying “Waterfall, next left”.
I think this one was a cedar. It was at least 15 feet across, with that shaggy half-falling-off bark pattern common to cedars. They’re not tidy trees. I don’t recall it being especially tall, either, just wide.
It was down a winding logging path going through a second-growth forest, most of the trees thin enough that they were probably only 50 years old or so at most. And then there was this one. Judging from this and a few other examples in the area, if the loggers that focused on this area during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s found a truly magnificent tree, they had a pretty good chance of letting it live. And later ones followed this pattern, and then added in the signage and roads so people could see these marvels.
Which lead to us going down said roads, so I guess it worked.
