Meeting Tree Beard up close

Yesterday I drove back from Edmonton to British Columbia. As usual, I couldn’t stick to a straight drive home, which should take around 10 hours, but which took me 13. Apart from a few detours in Jasper National Park, I also stopped at “The Ancient Forest,” about 130km east of Prince George.

This antique stand of cedars has managed to survive forest fires, natural pests and loggers for thousands of years, and forms part of one of the few remaining inland rainforests around. In fact, one of the cedars, which measures a puny 5 metres in diameter, is thought to be between 1000 and 2000 years old. The experts can’t be sure though, because the tree’s core is rotten.

I stopped at the trail because I was desperate to stretch my legs, and I really do believe that the journey is more important than the destination (within reason, of course). The well-marked route took around an hour, which included a detour to a little waterfall. I couldn’t show the sheer scale of the trees, so I include a few photos from another site:

And now here are mine:

Old trunk

Cedar circle, with one missing

Tree in a clearing

Treebeard

Roots

Treebeard Falls

Over the rocks

Buttress roots on the Radies Tree

A wider Cedar circle

The “Big Tree”

Pathway through the trees