The Balch Creek Fir

This Douglas fir is 74 metres tall. Nothing else in Portland comes close. The city register measures it at 243 feet, or 74.1 metres, with a trunk 5.58 metres around and 1.78 metres through. A student piece in the PSU Vanguard, working independently, arrived at exactly the same height and girth, which is reassuring for a measurement that is genuinely hard to take on a tree this size standing in a steep ravine. It grows at the bottom of the Balch Creek canyon in Forest Park, one of the largest urban forest reserves in the United States, on the Lower Macleay spur trail about a hundred yards past the stone house ruin that everyone here calls the Witch's Castle. A large stone beside the path marks it. Look up rather than around: at this height the top of the tree is well outside anything you can take in from the trail. No age is recorded anywhere, and that is not an oversight. This is not a planted landscape tree with a date attached to it but a survivor in a patch of regrown native forest, and nobody has cored it. The ravine explains the height. Steep, shaded, wet, sheltered from the wind, and never quite worth the trouble of logging.