The Hillside Park Redwood

A coast redwood 114 feet tall stands beside the front door of a gymnasium. Portland's heritage register gives the directions with unusual precision: to the right of the main entrance to the gym at Hillside Park, a small city park in the hills of NW Portland above Burnside. It records the rest in the same dry way. The trunk is 50 inches through and 5.06 metres round, the height about 35 metres, and the crown only 54 feet across, which is the redwood's usual shape, more column than dome. The city designated it a heritage tree in 2007. Coast redwoods are native to a narrow strip of the Pacific coast, from California into the far south of Oregon, so this one is several hundred kilometres north of its native range and has reached a size worth a heritage listing anyway, beside a door. Two things we cannot tell you. Nobody has published its age. And while the register still lists the tree and has never marked it removed, we found no recent photograph from the spot, so we have not confirmed for ourselves that it is still standing. If you pass the gym, look right, and tell us what you see. The Northwest District's two heritage elms are about 750 metres away, and Couch Park's cucumber tree about 1.4 kilometres east.