A hundred massive Douglas-Fir trees anchor Seward’s old-growth forest.
Keep a look out for these trees, especially the burned bark doug-firs, and a cedar or two, as you walk the trails at Seward.
They doug-firs start out as tiny seedlings – like the one pictured below – taking root in bare ground beneath an open sky after a stand-replacing fire.
They then live for centuries. After 200 years, with thick furrowed bark, they can survive all but the most severe fires.
The mature tree in the video, like many of its cousins, started life on the Seward (Lushootseed “sbəqʷábs“) peninsula after a huge regional fire in 15081. The seedling pictured2 above shows how our big firs looked one year after that fire, sprouting on bare ground in mineralize soil beneath an open sky. In the concluding drone shot, our tree is at the center with a broken top, other big firs all around.
Another regional fire – not quite so severe – followed two hundred years later, in 1701. Our “class of 1500” firs had by then acquired thick, fire-resistant, deeply furrowed bark.
This second fire left the burn marks which we see today, 300 years later. Almost everything else burned to the ground in that 1701 fire. A hundred firs and a few cedars survived. The woody rhizomes of sword ferns, tucked away safely underground, probably allowed them to survive the fire as well.
Keep a look out for burned bark doug-firs, and a cedar or two, as you walk the trails at Seward.
- 1508 and 1701 dates for regional fires obtained from “Forested plant associations of the Olympic National Forest” JA Henderson et al, 1989, page 13, pdf.
- Seedling photo credit: Brian Harvey.
- The poster’s big tree is the work of local artist Colleen Hayward.
- Contact me, Paul Shannon, with comments or questions.