Seward Park's Big Tree

Seattle's oldest known tree still carries the burn marks of two fires, one in 1508 and one in 1701, when the Puget lowlands went up and this Douglas fir did not. The scarred bark is on the trunk, which is about seven feet across. The tree is around 150 feet tall. How old is a matter of who you ask. Friends of Seward Park, the group that looks after the forest, says 500 years. Seattle Magazine says over 400. Somewhere in that band is the honest answer, and either end of it means this tree was a mature fir before any European saw Puget Sound. Bald eagles have nested in it. It used to carry a Heritage Tree plaque. The plaque was taken down because the number of people walking in to see it was wearing the ground away over the roots, which tells you both how good the tree is and how to behave around it. No source publishes where it stands inside the 120 acres of old growth on the Bailey Peninsula, so the pin marks the park rather than the trunk and finding it is part of the afternoon. One warning: the young fir the park's printed tree walk starts with, near the Audubon building, is a different tree and a couple of centuries younger.