These days, it’s hard to impress kids who have grown up on PlayStation, music videos, and TV cocktails spiked with attention deficit disorder. Show them a great mountain, a sweeping beach, a lush forest, and chances are they’ll be glued to their text messages on the smartphone you regretted the minute you bought it for them. Fortunately, Mother Nature still has some tricks up her foliage when it comes to impressing children, and it’s doubtful cell coverage will interfere at all. Yes, they’re just trees, kids. But look at the size of them!
The giant red cedars, Douglas firs, hemlocks, and spruce trees that survive in the old-growth forests of British Columbia are truly impressive. Somehow, these trees have survived the colonial building boom and the modern logging industry, and now range in age from 250 to more than 1,000 years old. “This tree was here before Marco Polo explored China, before Shakespeare … em, before Harry Potter!”
Canada’s Biggest Trees
According to the Ancient Forest Alliance, the town of Port Renfrew is the go-to place if you’re looking for the biggest trees in Canada. Near this Vancouver Island town, you can find the planet’s biggest Douglas fir, two record-sized spruce trees, the country’s finest red cedar stand in the endangered Central Walbran Valley, as well as Canada’s biggest tree, the Cheewhat Giant (a red cedar). Located within the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, the Cheewhat is 56 metres high, six metres in trunk diameter, and has enough timber volume to create 450 regular telephone poles’ worth of wood.
Fantasy is an apt means to capture a kid’s imagination, because standing between 800-year-old Douglas fir trees — some towering up to 75 metres in Cathedral Grove in Vancouver Island’s MacMillan Provincial Park — you can’t help but feel you’re on another planet. The forest moon of Endor comes to mind, although I’m dating myself with The Return of the Jedi. Perhaps the kids will prefer Avatar Grove, 15 minutes away from Port Renfrew, so named for this ancient red cedar and Douglas fir forest’s resemblance to the planet Pandora in the blockbuster Avatar. Surrounded by a drapery of fern and moss, with a soundtrack of chattering woodpeckers or babbling brooks, a spell of peace and space envelops adults, as well. When the kids get tired of trying to hug a trunk that can accommodate the linked hands of eight people, bedazzle them with a contorted red cedar known as “Canada’s Gnarliest Tree.” Keeping with the theme, it looks remarkably like Jabba the Hut.
According to the Ancient Forest Alliance, a B.C. organization working to protect these natural wonders (and to support sustainable forestry practices), less than 25 percent of the old-growth forest on Vancouver Island still exists, and only 10 percent of the biggest trees that you might find on a valley bottom. Some studies have shown that conserving old-growth trees might be more economically viable than slicing them down for furniture. A successful campaign by the (Rebel?) Alliance resulted in provincial protection for Avatar Grove, but the few remaining stands in the province are still threatened with clear-cutting. The emotional and childlike wonder that accompanies hiking an old-growth forest certainly belongs on our bucket list. Unfortunately, we have to add the caveat “while they still exist.”
START HERE: canadianbucketlist.com/oldgrowth