Among the Champions

Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.

John Muir

As my readers know, I grew up in western Washington. In times past most of that area was covered by old growth forest from the Cascade Mountains to the Pacific, but by the time I was born in the middle of the last century most of those trees had been harvested, and what remained was found in protected areas like National Parks.

Fortunately my family was fond of those protected areas and regularly spent time camping among the big trees. We made camp under tall Douglas fir and western hemlock on the banks of the Olympic Mountains’ beautiful rivers. We walked around the trunks of western red cedars, counting our steps so that we could estimate their girth. As a young woman I hiked among the tallest cedars I have ever seen on the Little Beaver Trail in the North Cascades west of Ross Lake. And many years later I would travel south to California to visit the giant sequoias and the redwoods, where in 2006 the tallest tree in the world was discovered, Hyperion, whose highest branches cannot be seen from the ground.

Like many Washingtonians I grew up with the misinformed belief that the best was in the west. How could it be otherwise? We have the Olympic Rain Forest, with its towering canopy of Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, western hemlock and red cedar, even giant big leaf maples, which dot the meadows by the Hoh River.

Last week I had a chance to change this opinion when my family visited South Carolina to celebrate my grandson’s graduation from basic training at Fort Jackson. As we were headed north on the interstate I spotted one of those wonderful brown and white signs that always get my attention: Congaree National Park. “Let’s go there,” I said. We did.

Whenever I visit a park that is new to me I typically start with the visitors’ center, where various displays tell the story of the park. I always pick up a field guide which then accompanies me on the hike to follow. As always there are surprises, in the visitors’ center and especially on the trail.

The surprise? The western forests do not hold as many records as Congaree National Park, which has one of the largest collections of Champion trees any where in the nation. The term champion was adopted in 1940 by American Forests, a nonprofit organization which sought standardization for measuring trees, taking into account height, crown spread, and trunk circumference. The grand champion is General Sherman, a giant sequoia, a champion among champions in that park.

But champions are found with greater abundance in Congaree National Park, fifteen of them as it turns out. Our short hike took us past bald cypress, elm, hickory, maple, oak, water tupelo, and a 168 foot tall loblolly pine. Along the trail we also spotted a rat snake sunning itself on a stump, the site of an old colony of escaped slaves, and the remains of a moonshine still from Prohibition days. The trail is lifted by a boardwalk above the mud, which extends nine feet below where we walked, allowing for water from the Congaree River to flow and thus reducing the likelihood of flooding, a factor that contributes to the great number of Champion trees.

I live in the Okanogan Highlands of northeastern Washington surrounded by a nearly pure stand of Ponderosa pine trees. It is beautiful but lacks the diversity of a healthy forest. The larch and fir were long ago harvested for firewood. I don’t mind. Being surrounded by trees, I am reminded everyday of their significance in my life.

Everyone of us is a champion of our own lives. We stand tall, swaying in the wind, shaped by the forces of nature until we come tumbling down in a crash or a burst of flame.

Yet it is the stillness that most impresses me as I look out my window at those trees. In a world increasingly fraught by war in the middle east and Ukraine, polarized political strife, and record setting global temperatures now for three months in a row, I want to grow tall and strong like the bald cypress, lifting my crown high above the chaos, bearing witness, feeling the current flow but remaining still as I send my roots into the deep dark earth.