The Quinault Big Spruce

This is the biggest Sitka spruce on record anywhere, and it is a few minutes' walk from a resort car park. American Forests lists it as the champion of its species, and by volume it ranks among the largest trees of any kind in the continental United States outside California's redwoods and sequoias. The numbers are the kind that stop meaning anything until you stand next to them. Nearly 18 metres round the trunk. About 58 metres tall. A crown reaching some 29 metres across. Visitor sources usually give its age as around a thousand years, and that is a loose figure passed from one writer to the next rather than anything counted, so read it as somewhere between eight and twelve centuries. Nobody has published a proper dating. What is missing from this tree's story is also worth noting: drama. The cedars and the beach spruce out to the west are famous partly for what is happening to them, split by a storm, reduced to a strip of living bark, undercut by a creek. No one has reported any damage or decline here. It is simply very large and, as far as anyone has reported, healthy. It is also the easy visit. It stands inside Olympic National Park, the trail is flat and 0.4 miles out and back from the Rain Forest Resort Village on South Shore Road by Lake Quinault, and it costs nothing.