Twenty minutes west of Tillamook, on the headland at Cape Meares, stands a Sitka spruce with no trunk. Six heavy limbs leave a base about fifteen metres wide, run out sideways as far as five metres and only then turn and climb. It is called the Octopus Tree, and also the Candelabra Tree, the Council Tree and, by someone less taken with it, the Monstrosity Tree. Local tradition says Native people shaped it deliberately. That account is disputed.
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Photo: Rizka (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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Octopus Tree
Sitka Spruce (Picea sitchensis) · roughly 250 to 300 years · a short walk from the Cape Meares Lighthouse parking area
This spruce has no trunk. Six heavy limbs leave a base roughly fifteen metres wide, run out sideways for as much as five metres, and only then turn and climb, so the tree reads as six trees that agreed on a starting point.
How it got that way is an open argument. Local tradition holds that Native people shaped the young tree deliberately, and one version of the story says the limbs were meant to cradle canoes in burial rites. That account is disputed and has never been confirmed. The tree is worth the walk under either explanation.
It is roughly two hundred and fifty to three hundred years old and over fourteen metres round the base, and it has collected names in proportion: the Octopus Tree, the Candelabra Tree, the Council Tree and, from someone less taken with it, the Monstrosity Tree. Oregon lists it as a Heritage Tree.
It stands a few minutes' walk from the Cape Meares Lighthouse parking area at the Cape Meares State Scenic Viewpoint, out on the headland about twenty minutes west of Tillamook. The path is short, easy and signed, and none of it costs anything.
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