The Forest Through the Trees

• 1 Fishtale Organic IPA - Quinault Lodge
• 1 Pyramid Hefeweizen - Quinault Lodge
• 1 Dynamite Cabernet - Quinault Lodge

Today Susan and I visited Olympic National Forest and stayed overnight at Lake Quinault Lodge - "The Rest Is Easy" (haha, clever people they are). Two hikes took us through an amazing section of the rain forest and through a peaceful path of old growth forest. I forget how much I miss nature until I'm back in it. I loved the enormity of trees and it really only occurred to me on this trip that even the tallest, most solid tree in the forest, is still growing; that each day it's slowly getting wider and taller. And they're already so big! It's almost eerie, these massive wooden towers growing straight out of the ground into the sky for no other reason than to exist. I guess I've never thought of it that way before because urban trees are surrounded by buildings and there are so few of them in comparison. Trees in a forest stand together and they become the forest - they are the forest. And when you're standing at the bottom of them, at the point they come out of the earth, it's overwhelming.

The rain forest trail had many downed trees caused by last winter's storm. This gave a more personal look at the trees in the forest because I could walk along the length of trees that were hundreds of feet tall. The one pictured above was about three feet wide and easily a few hundred feet long, and it had to be cut at one point because it had crossed the trail. I walked along some of these trees and thought about the day they came down. What storm was powerful enough to take it down; after all, it had been here for a few hundred years already. Did it cause others to fall? Could anyone hear it when it hit? What will it look like a decade, or a century from now, after it's covered with moss, other trees, and other forestry things?

The Olympic National Park is home to six of the world's largest trees. The world's largest! No other tree of this type is larger! We visited the WL Sitka Spruce and the WL Red Cedar. The Spruce was easy to get to; it was more of an RV side-of-the-road attraction that was set out in the open. It was about 1000 years old(!) and was at the end of it's life and had started to decay. The Red Cedar involved more of a steep hike to get to and was definitely at the end of it's life. The inside was open so you could walk into the center and look straight up and into the sky. I wondered how it was found originally. Hunters? Hikers? High school students from the 1600's? Much to wonder...