Great hikes to see the great trees

By Reese Halter, Calgary HeraldJune 28, 2009

The best thing about summer is going outdoors. The West Coast is a magical place for hiking with family or friends and it's exceptional camping country, too.

In 1986, Wayne Topolewski, a forestry classmate at UBC, and I visited the west side of Vancouver Island, about 20 kilometres northwest of Port Renfrew, in search of massive Sitka spruce.

We hiked into the Carmanah Valley, an extremely lush rainforest which receives almost four metres of rainfall each year, and marvelled at what we found--the biggest trees we'd ever seen. We measured some and they were equivalent to 30-storey skyscrapers. It turns out that the canopies of the Sitka spruce, western hemlock, amabilis fir and western red cedar were loaded with undiscovered plant and animal life. Some treetops had as many as 1,000 strains of a single species of fungus, while others were endowed with lichens (half algae and half fungus). These treetops are home to an astonishing array of life weighing easily in excess of 500 kilograms per hectare.

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Great hikes to see the great trees

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