One of my favourite bits to do on my Forest Walks begins by first asking participants what the tallest tree in the world is. Usually people are quick to answer that it is Redwoods in California. Some can even give the name of the tallest tree in the world: Hyperion. A Coastal Redwood tree in Redwood National Park that currently stands at 116 meters tall. (The Statue of Liberty is 93 meters tall)
What makes this bit fun though is the second part: Where I ask if they know what the tallest tree that ever existed was. Nobody knows the answer to this and guess what? The tallest tree that ever existed was likely a Douglas Fir that grew in Vancouver!!
The Lynn Valley Tree was a 126 meter tall (10 meters taller then Hyperion) Douglas Fir that was logged in Vancouver’s Lynn Valley in 1902. There was also a 125 meter tall Douglas Fir in Vancouver’s Kerrisdale Neighbourhood that was logged around 1875.
These two were likely not even the tallest trees in Vancouver, they were just the ones were someone had a long enough measuring instrument handy! As documented by Ira Sutherland on his incredible Vancouver Big Trees website, there is evidence of there being even larger trees growing in Vancouver.
At the time, loggers didn’t care. There were giant, unbelievably large trees everywhere and they seemed to go on endless. It was incomprehensible to them that someday they would all – almost- be gone. Trees so big it could take 8 men working for two straight 12 hour days to bring them down. Moving them would take even longer. They weren’t there to measure these behemoths, they had too much work to do.
Hyperion was only discovered to be biggest tree in the world in 2006, because it was surrounded by a forest of other giant trees and is only just barely taller then them.
Hyperion’s exact location is kept secret and there are a lot of photos online that claim to be Hyperion, but are not! A lot of the photos of Hyperion are actually of the General Sherman Tree, which is also a species of Redwood – a Giant Sequoia – and has the biggest tree stem of any tree on earth.
To grow super tall like the Lynn Valley Tree and Hyperion, the main danger for trees is wind. If you are too thick, you can’t bend with the wind as easy and will snap. General Sherman is ‘only’ (it is still massive!) 80 meters tall which makes only about 2/3s as big as the Lynn Valley Trees 126 meters.
Wind is also why the tallest trees in the world are often surrounded by other tall trees. These trees help block the wind so it is not as strong. But they also act as braces for each other. When walking through the forest on a windy day you can see the tops of the trees leaning on each other as the wind blows against them.
Trees, much like humans, did not evolve to be solitary creatures.
A great example of the damage that wind can do tall trees is in Stanley Park. Stanley Park has a long history of powerful windstorms with hurricane force winds. There was a particularly bad one in 2006, whose legacy the Park is still recovering from, and they seem to occur ever 40 years or so with bad ones in 1962, 1934, and one that ripped houses out from their foundations on Christmas, December 25th, 1901.
In fact, some of the tallest trees in the Stanley Park right now are old-growth Douglas Fir that have lost their top halves in these windstorms and are are still among the tallest in the park!
If you want to find out where these ancient Douglas Fir are in Stanley Park and explore other ancient trees, I highly highly recommend going on one of Colin Spratt’s Ancient Tree Vancouver Walking Tours. You will never look at Stanley Park the same after this walk! Colin’s walks can be pricey, but Colin has devoted his life to finding and preserving big trees, many of them much closer to the city of Vancouver then we have realized. So think of it as donation to save old-growth trees and you also get to learn where these trees are – then come back and visit them!
Stanley Park’s windstorms have become a big problem for Stanley Park. Locals always mention to me how shocked they are by how sparse the forest there has become. That you used to be able to walk for hours and remain in the shade the whole time. However, with the 2006 windstorm and the 2020 Hemlock Looper Moth Outbreak approximately 11,000 dying trees have had to be removed.
You walk in Stanley Park during summer months and it can become very uncomfortably hot and dry in the forest because so much sun gets through.
Do you know the best deep shady forest to cool off in during the summer in Vancouver? A local forest where you can walk for more than an hour and be in the shade the entire time? A forest you can walk into in the middle of a boiling hot day and feel a cool breeze and moisture in the air?
You want to visit Pacific Spirit Park.
Stanley Park might have the oldest and biggest trees, but Pacific Spirit Park has the best forest.
Pacific Spirit Park is not near as exposed to the wind (although we did have a tornado touch down in 2021!) as Stanley Park. It also has a lot less human disturbance and has been lucky to not have a Hemlock Looper Moth outbreak like Stanley Park did.
This has allowed a large Douglas Fir forest to grow back rapidly in Pacific Spirit. Which means it looks a lot more like the native, dense forests where Hyperion and the Lynn Valley Tree were found.
My favourite example of this is along Council Trail an area that was clearcut in 1910, and then in 1930 was densely packed with ten inch diameter Douglas Fir, and now almost 100 years later is full of mature Douglas Firs growing at an incredible rate. Council Trail is my favourite spot to go watch the trees blow in the wind. Someday, maybe the tallest tree in the world will grow there.
As Jared Farmer, in one of my favourite books, Elder Flora says: The Old Growth of tomorrow is growing today.
For more from Ryan please visit https://www.ryanforestwalks.ca/