Postcards from the Rogue Valley

This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

Ancient — and not so ancient — trees are precious in ways we never knew, today’s forest scientists tell us. They communicate. They migrate. They protect. They heal. 

The novelist Richard Powers, in his award-winning The Overstory, shares some of this science.

“You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor,” he explains. “A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes.”

When I was thirteen, newly arrived in Southern California and uprooted from ivy-covered Princeton, New Jersey, my first trip up the Pacific Coast Highway, from Los Angeles to San Francisco, took my breath away. The march of waves hitting rocks 900 feet below against a blue horizon were the stars. 

When I was 71, newly arrived in Southern Oregon and visiting the Oregon coast for the first time, the abundance of “mature” and “old growth” trees drew me in as much as the rugged cliffs, sandy beaches, and unique rock formations. Here, towering spruce and redwoods guarded both sides of the Oregon Coast Highway’s 363-mile trek from the California border to Washington state.

If “forest bathing,” the practice of spending prolonged periods of solitude with trees, enriches life, I was in.

Richard Powers continues:

We found that trees could communicate, over the air and through their roots. We found that trees take care of each other…. [that] seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and set buds accordingly . . . that trees sense the presence of other nearby life … that a tree learns to save water… that trees feed their young and bank resources and warn kin. They wire themselves up underground.  Root plasticity. Fungal synapses. A forest knows things.”

The Grove of Titans

My love affair with ancient and not so ancient trees began close to home. Near the southern tip of US 101— little more than a two-hour drive from Ashland — Jedidiah Smith Redwoods State Park offers the “Grove of Titans.” Known by indigenous people for thousands of years, the group of trees was “re-discovered” and named by researchers in the late 1990’s. Implausibly tall and imponderably old, the trees seem to operate on different principles of time and size. On our first visit to the grove, I turned to Tony and said, “I think I’m shrinking.” 

On another visit, with our then four-year-old grandson, we took photos of the large protuberances that grew from some of trunks, a few sprouting plant life of their own. “Those are the biggest noses I’ve ever seen,” Lucas said.

Unlike the giant trees in Sequoia National Park that carry the names of U.S. generals and presidents — from Sherman and Robert E. Lee to Lincoln and Roosevelt — the titans in Jedidiah Smith answer to names like Stalagmight and Sacajawea, Lost Monarch and El Viejo del Norte.

In time, Tony and I took our tree wonder north to Yachats, a small resort town along the central coast and two miles north of Cape Perpetua, one of 18 majestic headlands that span the Oregon shoreline. At its highest point, Cape Perpetua rises to over 800 feet above sea level. From its crest, on a clear day, one can see 70 miles of Oregon coastline and as far as 37 miles out to sea. 

Visitors here are drawn to the Devils Churn, a long crack in the coastal rock that fills with each ocean wave, occasionally exploding as incoming and outgoing waves collide. There’s also the Spouting Horn and Thor’s Well, salt water fountains driven by the power of the ocean tide. A trail near the Visitor Center leads to a 600-year-old giant Sitka spruce known as the Silent Sentinel of the Siuslaw, 185 feet high with a 40-foot  circumference at its base.

Tony and I, however, head to the top of Cape Perpetua where we follow a 5.7 mile trail that winds its way through a pristine forest of Red Cedars, Douglas Firs, and five-foot tall ferns to the town below. It’s called Amanda’s Trail and it tracks the last four miles of a 75-mile forced march by an elderly, barefoot, runaway Native woman, Amanda De-Cuy, in 1864. 

Hiking Amanda’s Trail, it’s hard to know which way to look: down, at the tree roots that make the trail treacherous or up at the two-to-three hundred foot tall canopy, outlined against the blue sky one day, shrouded in fog on another. Ten thousand cathedrals rolled into one, I’ve thought.

We are the only hikers. Silence bathes our steps.

Protecting what we have

Never before in our nation’s history, I wager, have our forests seemed more threatened. A century of fire suppression — robbing forests of the “good fire” they need to thin their numbers when overcrowded and to clear underbrush — combined with heat and drought, have exacted a high price. The 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, CA, is a stunning example. 

“When trees burn, they leave the smell of heartbreak in the air,” says author Jodi Thomas.

Insect and beetle infestation, we are seeing, pose an equal scourge to weakened trees. As I have written before, beetles are decimating the Douglas Firs in Ashland’s Watershed, turning them green to rust; in five years, some predict, the forests that rise up from town will be largely bare.

And we lose as the trees lose. Each year since 2000, worldwide, forests are estimated to have removed an average of 2 billion metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere. Recent studies suggest trees may be removing methane too. And they act as an all-natural water treatment system

Still, it is the loss — or preservation — of old growth forests that wrings my heart most. 

Oregon, I learned while researching this story, is the state with the second largest acreage of old growth forests in the U.S., behind the immense Tsongas National Forest in Alaska. 

There are many types of old-growth forests in Oregon, but generally speaking, old growth means a forest that has not undergone any major unnatural changes (such as logging) for more than 100 to 150 years. 

Old-growth forests in Oregon can be ancient, such as the 600 to 1000-year-old cedar groves in the Big Bottom area of the Clackamas River. They can also be younger, such as the 100 to 150 year old stands found in parts of the Willamette National Forest. In the wet, western part of the state, old-growth Douglas-firs can be giants, 10 feet thick and hundreds of feet tall.  In dry Eastern and Southern Oregon, an old-growth ponderosa pine may only be 18 inches thick, while 200-year-old juniper trees can stand only 20 feet tall. (Oregon Wild)

My hikes through the forests of coastal Oregon have taught me to pay attention to the forest floor as well as the canopy. Look around and you will likely see various species of mosses and lichen, broken branches, cracked-open trunks, decaying “nurse logs,” and more. Over time, these conditions have created pockets for a wide variety of plant and animal life, essential for protection against disease and infestation and promoting genetic and species biodiversity.

Old-growth forests once covered much of Oregon, but today less than 10 percent of the state’s heritage forests remain. Clear cut logging has been the executioner.

A walk in the woods

Three weeks ago, when temperatures over 100 degrees continued to haunt Southern Oregon, Tony and I headed to the northernmost headlands of the Oregon Coast. At Cape Meares, where old-growth forest surrounded by a tumultuous ocean set the scene, we went in search of its two best known residents: the Octopus Tree and the Cape Meares Giant. 

The Octopus Tree is a 300-year old, tentacled spruce with no central trunk – it’s not clear how it lost its top — whose limbs extend horizontally for as much as 30 feet before turning inward. 

The Cape Meares Giant also lost its top, but its giant girth gives it enough bulk to make it the second official biggest spruce in Oregon. It is estimated to be as much as 1,000 years old.

A few steps away, a huge snag — the stump that remains from a felled tree — has given birth to a flourish of new but evanescent plant life, no match for its ancestor.

Richard Powers reminds us of the alchemy of trees. “Trees know when we are close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes of their leaves pump out change when we’re near,” he writes. “When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you.” 

I have been bribed.

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