Sylvia

Sylvia was the biggest tree in King County until the morning of 20 January 1993, when an inauguration day windstorm came up Lake Washington and took her top off. She was 255 feet then. She is a good deal shorter now and still standing, which is the part worth walking for: a Douglas fir about eight metres round, growing here since roughly the time Constantinople fell. The snapped crown is not damage so much as biography. A Douglas fir that loses its leader does not die, it reorganises, pushing side branches upward into a candelabra of new tops. Sylvia has been doing that for thirty years and the result looks nothing like the clean spire in a forestry photograph. She stands in what is left of the lowland old growth that once ran unbroken from the lake to the Cascades. O.O. Denny Park keeps about forty acres of it, given to Seattle by the Denny family and now looked after by Kirkland. The trail in from Holmes Point Drive follows a creek under trees that were already large when the first mill opened on the far shore. We cannot give you a pin on the trunk. Follow the creek trail and look for the one with no proper top.