Octopus Tree

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.