VALLEY OF THE (LEFTOVER) GIANTS

This remote, hard-to-find place deep in the Coast Mountains is one of the best last remnants of primal Oregon. I counted growth rings, many thin as a knife blade, on the red trunk of an old giant recently felled across the trail by a winter Pacific gale. It was a seedling before the Pilgrims arrived in New England.

The Valley of the Giants is a small obscure preserve surrounded by cut-over mountains and managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, an agency generally indifferent to trees you can’t cut down and sell. This is the country where TV reality show’s “Ax Men” do their work. You get to the Valley of the Giants via a 30-mile maze of private timber company roads with big red signs warning “recreation users” of a litany of rules for the privilege of driving on their logging roads. Not permitted: campers, recreational vehicles, trailers, motorcycles, all terrain vehicles, fires, target shooting, camping, wood cutting, etc., etc. It’s a small miracle than any old trees escaped in this part of the state. But they did and are safe now. It’s an official federal “Outstanding Natural Area.”

The largest giant, the “Big Guy” blown down 30 years ago, was a Douglas fir more than 600 years old and 230-feet tall. You can squeeze through a slice cut near its fallen bole. (Or take the Wal-Mart Detour (my name) around the immense uprooted base. I figured that if the check-out lanes at Wal-Mart were as narrow as that tree slice the store would go broke.)

I first learned about Douglas fir trees in college. I never had seen a live Douglas fir but loved the musical quality of its Latin name: Pseudotsuga menziesii.

I still have my old dendrology textbook and carry it in my car with a 40-pound box of nature guides. It says that Douglas fir can live for 1,400 years. A tree that old could be 15 feet wide and far taller than the length of a football field.

I can believe that, having visited the Valley of the Giants. For despite its grand-sounding name it really is the Valley of the Leftovers. I’m sure that all the true giants of the Northwest were among the first trees cut down. Maybe in future centuries some of these minor giants will survive to break tree bigness records. We’ll never know but it doesn’t matter. They exist at the moment.

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SNOW VISIT

I visited snow yesterday. The big rain we got the day before dumped snow on the mountains you can see from town. That meant over-full waterfalls and white-bedecked fir trees. Up I went.

As a general principle I hate snow. I’ve always detested snow even though I spent most of my life living where winter means snow. No more. Not here in the Willamette Valley. Now I enjoy snow on my own terms. Kind of like grandchildren.

Kids are a wonderful thing, don’t get me wrong. Everyone should have some. Hopefully, when young so there’s still time to recover and live a selfish life after they move out. For one thing, without them you can’t get grandchildren, one of the best parts of the whole deal.

But when you have kids around it’s not often that you get to listen to snow dripping onto moss, winter wrens warbling in tune with the creek, and absolutely nothing else. I drove up to the edge of snowline. The trail was muddy with globs of slush falling from 200-foot trees. Fog hung on the cliffs. Hillsides gushed water like colossal plumbing failures.

Everyone should eat a little fresh-fallen snow now and then -- say, once a year. It’s living with snow 24-7 that’s so awful. Driving in it. Walking in it. Shoveling it over and over and over. I used to use a snow shovel to periodically clean one of our teenager’s rooms. Everything on his floor would be scooped into giant trash bags – candy wrappers, dirty socks, video games, unfinished homework, CD cases, half-eaten pizza. The bags would go outside with the threat to let the garbage man pick them up.

Now my snow shovel mostly gathers dust in the garage. That’s as it should be. Now my snow is in balance: close but not too close. I can visit it when I choose. And if the weather changes and crap starts coming out of the sky I can head for home where it almost never snows.

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