A grove of ancient western red cedars is seen from above, growing on the shores of Barkley Sound off the coast of Vancouver Island, west of Port Alberni, B.C. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Colin Spratt
Our journey has taken us along a remote stretch of coastline on southwestern Vancouver Island, to a grove of spectacular western red cedars that offers a portal to a distant time. “The sad reality is there’s so little left. What drives you is this incredible desire to sort of prove yourself wrong, that it’s not all gone, that there are still these mythically large trees you’re reading about from the 1800s,” says Spratt, who runs Ancient Trees of Vancouver, a walking tour that visits old giants in Stanley Park.
Our expedition to find a cedar crossing the six-metre threshold involves an hour-long boat ride down the Alberni Inlet before setting up camp for two nights. A small but spry-looking branch with sprigs of cedar foliage sprouts from the tree before its trunk splits into a silvery candelabra.Herringer wraps his tape measure — a special tree-measuring tool that is calibrated to give the diameter based on the circumference — around the trunk to reveal a diameter belied by its striking presence: 4.65 metres.
If not for the regulation, the Barkley Sound giants would likely have been cut when B.C.-based company Interfor logged the area in 2021, says Herringer, who works as a forest technologist with BC Timber Sales, the agency that manages about 20 per cent of annual harvest on public land. For more than a century, the biggest trees have been “heavily targeted” for logging, the B.C. government says. Big-treed old growth is “now very rare compared to its historic distribution, putting it at extremely high near-term risk,” it says.
Our first day on the shores of Barkley Sound is spent thrashing through dense undergrowth and navigating two cut blocks littered with stumps and splintered wood to find a 4.52-metre western red cedar estimated to be 2,800 years old. Sitting in the darkness as our heart rates settle, we try to wrap our heads around the cougar’s behaviour — and feel profound relief that none of us have been hurt.
The biggest trees perform vital ecological functions — from supporting high levels of biodiversity to filtering water to storing carbon — but they’re also intrinsically special and valuable as some of the largest organisms on Earth, she says.